Jacob Have I Loved by Katherine Paterson (1990, Paperback, Reissue)

Jacob have I loved is a book that truly touches your soul. This book is about Sara,AKA Wheeze,and she retells her childhood experience on Rass Island and what she later becomes. This book starts out with Wheeze who is 13 and hats her sister Caroline; the beautiful, talented twin sister. She doesn't resemble a pretty girl, and overall does a man's job in catching crabs with her friend Call. Her mother was a school teacher and now a stay at home mom, her dad is a fisherman, and her grandmother is a crabby person overall. One day a strange man comes to Rass Island and everyone thinks is the long lost Hiram Wallace so days after he settles in Wheeze and Call go investigate and end up being friends with him. Soon after the terrible storm of '42 takes all the villagers by surprise Hiram ends up homeless. He later marries the old lady with the cats when she soon gets better after she fell down in her house. Call ends up dropping out of school and working with Wheeze's father. World War II starts and Call enlists in the armed forces and is sent away. Once her sister goes to New York for her singing lessons she ends up dropping out of school. She helps her father in his fishing boat hunting for oysters. After some time helping her father, he tries to convince her to do something else since she was becoming a lady. She ignores this and continues in this path. Call comes home and now more masculine than before (he was fat)meets Wheeze at the docks. She thinks maybe she would want to be with him from now and and he ends up telling her he is going to marry her sister. This shocks her so much and eventually Caroline and Call get married a year after. Wheeze still in Rass Island lets out all her bottled emotions and asks her mom, why she choose to live in Rass? This ends up in a conversation where Wheeze is questioning her mom on why she choose to throw her life away in that island when she could have been whatever she wanted. At last her mother asks, "What do you want us to do for you, Louise?" Sarah says, "Let me go. Let me leave!" Her mother says,"Of course you may leave, You never said before you wanted to leave." At that moment Sarah realized that all her anger and frustration she confronted, and the thought that she was needed there, was something she needed so that she wouldn't leave Rass. Sarah ends up going to a University to become a doctor, but since it was hard for a female to become a doctor back in those days, she ends up volunteering in going to work as a nurse, mid-wife in a village, so later after some years she could be offered a full paid scholarship to medical school. She goes to an Appalachian community and works there. She gains valuable skills, and ends up treating Joseph's son who had a severe earache and a fever. Once she sits down with him for a cup of coffee she ends up telling him her view of where she lived on Rass Island and he asks her, "Why would a woman like you, who could have anything she wanted, come to a place like this?" This ultimately brought Sarah to like him and eventually marries him,adopts his 3 children, who were without a mom ,and has some of her own. As time passes, her grandmother, William, and even her father dies. In the last scene of this book, Sarah is called in for a birth and the mother bore twins, a boy who came out fine, and a girl who is almost dead. She gets her to be healthy and realizes she forgot about the boy and relieves her childhood nightmare. She tells her mother to watch over him.

Loved this well-written thoughtful book! It even made me laugh out loud in
some parts. Who can't identify with the main character, who is sure her sister
is the "golden girl"-and thinks of herself as an ugly duckling?? It is an interesting book that gives the reader a look at the lifestyle of the people who live in the Cheasapeake Bay area.