TN Read-Along #5: Jacob Have I Loved Discussion Thread/Live Chat
Live chat about Jacob Have I Loved TONIGHT — 8:30 PM ET! Bring your beverage of choice and your strongest opinions about the sainted Caroline, spared cats, plotting pace, and how many times we can type the word “crabs” without giggling. And if some baseball-playoffs talk sneaks in there, well, we’ll manage somehow. Heh.
The chat window should appear just below this graf; if you can’t see it, please let me know. Hope you can make it!
ETA: The chat went nearly two hours and covered all sorts of territory — Jean Auel, the ponies of Assateague (hee), sibling rivalry, folk songs, and fratty towns of our proud nation. You can read along with that below.
And please do discuss the book in this thread if you couldn’t make it. We’ll hope to see you next time.
Tags: fratty bubelatties Jean Auel Katherine Paterson The TN Read-Along
For whatever reason, my final comment didn’t post in time – thanks for letting me play, everyone – so glad I found you this evening.
I meant to mention this in the chat, but I have a copy with this cover…what’s with the giant neon sweatshirt and mom jeans? No wonder Call ends up with Caroline.
Agggggggghhhhh, got here five minutes too late! Stupid artist husband and his stupid comic book pages that he JUST FINISHED AND HAD TO SHOW ME. Well, no, not really, but you get drift.
Sooooo…about the book. This is one that I skimmed about ten thousand times as a tween, but never really settled down to read. Paterson just never rang my bell–this and Bridge to Terabithia, I just couldn’t make my heart warm to them.
So, really reading it for the first time, I was shocked at the realization that Caroline is really not Evil Incarnate. She’s a normal teenage girl who got two mega-useful gifts handed to her–her looks and her musical talent–and basically because of that her life is just set on an easier, steadier path than most peoples’. She’s not hugely spoiled or mean or catty: when they can’t afford to send her to her music lessons, she just accepts she has to pracitce at home. The worst thing she does deliberately is use the Jergen’s!
But that’s why Louise is a really good character–Paterson isn’t afraid to make her unsympathetic at times, and annoying a lot of the time, because that’s the time of your life when you just are those things, and having Amazing Gifted Beauty for your TWIN really does rub it in your face. And the way Caroline can just help herself to things Louise has mentally marked off as “Nobody Else Wants Them So They’re MINE” really would rub like salt on a rash. Caroline comes up with the plan to save the cats, she matchmakes the Captain and Auntie Braxton (because she can see that Auntie’s the long love of the Captain’s life), she even gets engaged to Call. All Louise gets is crabs (heh, and not even in a fun way!) ruined hands, and a Grandmother who really needs to be taken out back and put down.
(I love Grandma, by the way, as a “what a great character I thank God and Jesus I don’t have to live with” way) because again, Paterson Goes There with an older character, a Grandmother, for heaven’s sake, who is the kind of nasty, cruel, ungrateful woman who exists all over in real life but hardly ever in YA literature.)
I agree that the end is rushed–we’ve been slogging with Louise through her meticulously maintained Pity Swamp for so long that her actual growning up, graduating with awesome grades, Getting Emotional Permission From Mom To Leave, etc. just kinda happens.
And frankly, when I was a kid, getting to be a nurse in the most rural part of Appalachia with the drunk wife-beaters was…not what I had in mind as a personal triumph, you know? More along the lines of actually GOING TO MEDICAL SCHOOL instead of accepting my helper identity but it’s okay now! Though I suppose appreciation makes up for a hell of a lot.
Two more things: CATS. I was really afraid for them. I mean if Paterson can drown a KID she’s not gonna draw the line at a bunch of feral cats! Thank God she did.
And the carol: I got chills at that part, because I performed that solo twice–once in High School, once in college. Ooooohhh. I do love it, always have.
I totally missed it (stupid Pacific time zone!) but I loved reading the transcript. I’m reminded once again that the Tomato Nation are my people. My people who also hate Amy March, read Clan of the Cave Bear way too young, and imagined having fatal diseases thanks to Lurlene McDaniel…
This has nothing to do with the actual read-along, but with the whole Laura Ingalls Wilder saga (referenced in the whole snowbank drinking pee thing above). When I first read them around age 6, I got scarlet fever and I was convinced that I would end up blind. I sat in the pediatrician’s office and sobbed, and then I cried all the way home, and then my mother finally got me to tell her why I was crying so much and she could not stop laughing at me. I didn’t believe her that I would be ok so I spent about a week convincing my little sister that I had to train her to be my seeing eye dog.
Any of y’all who were on the chat the other night good with Photoshop? By “good” I mean “better than I am,” which is a lot of leeway. Drop me an email — bunting at tomatonation dot com — if you’d like to help me out on one of those shirt ideas.