Jacob have I loved / Katherine Paterson.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Katherine Paterson's remarkable Newbery Medal-winning classic about a painful sibling rivalry, and one sister's struggle to make her own way, is an honest and daring portrayal of adolescence and coming of age.

A strong choice for independent reading, both for summer reading and homeschooling, as well as in the classroom, Jacob Have I Loved has been lauded as a cornerstone young adult novel and was ranked among the all-time best children's novels in a survey published by School Library Journal.

"Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated . . ." With her grandmother's taunt, Louise knew that she, like the biblical Esau, was the despised elder twin. Caroline, her selfish younger sister, was the one everyone loved.

Growing up on a tiny Chesapeake Bay island, angry Louise reveals how Caroline has robbed her of everything: her hopes for schooling, her friends, her mother, even her name. While everyone pampers Caroline, Wheeze (her sister's name for her) begins to learn the ways of the watermen and the secrets of the island, especially of old Captain Wallace, who has mysteriously returned after fifty years.

The war unexpectedly gives this independent girl a chance to fulfill her dream to work on the water alongside her father. But the dream does not satisfy the woman she is becoming. Alone and unsure, Louise begins to fight her way to a place for herself outside her sister's shadow. But in order to do that, she must first figure out who she is...

Excerpt provided by Syndetics

Jacob Have I Loved SNY Chapter One During the summer of 1941, every weekday morning at the top of the tide, McCall Purnell and I would board my skiff and go progging for crab. Call and I were right smart crabbers, and we couldalways come home with a little money as well as plenty of crab for. supper. Call was a year older than I and would never have gone crabbing with a girl except that his father was dead, so he had no man to take him on board a regular crab boat. He was, as well, a boy who had matured slowly, and being fat and nearsighted, he was dismissed by most of the island boys. Call and I made quite a pair. At thirteen I was tall and large boned, with delusions of beauty and romance. He, at fourteen,. was pudgy, bespectacled, and totally unsentimental. "Call, I would say, watching dawn break crimson over the Chesapeake Bay, "I hope I have a sky like this the day I get married." "Who would marry you?" Call would ask, not meanly, just facing facts. "Oh," I said one day, "I haven't met him yet." "Then you ain't likely to. This is a right small island." "It won't be an islander." "Mr. Rice has him a girl friend in Baltimore." I sighed. All the girls on Rass Island were half in love with Mr. Rice, one of our two high school teachers. He was the only relatively unattached man most of us had ever known. But Mr., Rice had let it get around that his heart was given to a lady from Baltimore. "Do you suppose," I asked, as I poled the skiff, the focus of my romantic musings shifting from my own wedding day to Mr. Rice's, "do you suppose her parents oppose the marriage?" "Why should they care?" Call, standing on the port washboard, had sighted the head of what seemed to be a large sea terrapin and was fixing on it a fierce concentration. I shifted the pole to starboard . We could get a pretty little price for a terrapin. of that size. The terrapin sensed the change in our direction and dove straight through the eelgrass into the bottom mud, but: Call "had the net waiting, so that when the old bull hit his hiding place, he was yanked to the surface and deposited into a waiting pail. Call grunted with satisfaction. We might make as much as fifty cents on that one catch, ten times the price of a soft blue crab. got some mysterious illness and doesn't want to be a burden to him." "Who?" "Mr. Rice's finance." I had picked up the word, but not the pronunciation from my reading. It was not in the spoken vocabulary of most islanders. "His what?" "The woman he's engaged to marry, stupid." "How come you think she's sick?" "Something is delaying the consumption of their union." Jerked his head around to give me one of his looks, but the washboards of a skiff are a precarious perat best, so he didn't stare long enough to waste time or risk a dunking. He left me to what he presumed to be my looniness and gave his attention to the eelgrass. We were a good team on the water. I could pole a skiff quickly and quietly, and nearsighted as he was he could spy a crab by just a tip of the claw through grass and muck. He rarely missed one, and he knew I wouldn't jerk or swerve at the wrong moment. I'm sure that's why he stuck with me. I stuck with him not only because we could work well together, but because our teamwork was so automatic that I was free to indulge my romantic fantasies at the same time. That this part of my nature was wasted on Call didn't matter. He didn'thave any friends but me, so he wasn't likely to repeat what I said to someone who might snicker. Call himself never laughed. I thought of it as a defect in his character that I must try to correct, so I told him jokes. "Do you know why radio announcers have tiny hands?" "Huh?" "Wee paws for station identification," I would whoop. "Yeah?" "Don't you get it, Call? Wee paws. Wee Paws." I let go the pole to shake my right hand at him. "You know, little hands-paws." "You ain't never seen one." "One What?" "One radio announcer." "No." "Then how do you know how big their hands are?" "I don't. It's a joke, Call." "I don't see how it can be a joke if you don't even know if they have big hands or little hands. Suppose they really have big hands. Then you ain't even telling the truth. Then what happens to your joke?" It's just a joke, Call. It doesn't matter whether it's true or not." "It matters to me. Why should a person think a" "Never mind, Call. It doesn't matter." But he went on, mumbling like a little old preacher about the importance of truth and how you couldn't trust radio announcers anymore. You'd think I'd give up, but I didn't. "Call, did you hear about the lawyer, the dentist, and the p-sychiatrist who died and went to heaven?" "Was it a airplane crash." "No, Call. It's a joke... Jacob Have I Loved SNY . Copyright © by Katherine Paterson . Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from Jacob Have I Loved by Katherine Paterson All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

School Library Journal Review

Gr 5-9-Katherine Paterson's acclaimed novel (HarperCollins, 1980) tells of Sara Louise, a girl with a twin so beautiful, talented, and charming that Sara can find no real place or identity for herself either with her family or on the small island in the Chesapeake Bay which is her home. While Sara Louise spends her days in the shadows helping her father with the crabs and oysters that are their livelihood, Caroline becomes a star performer in island concerts, wins a scholarship to Julliard, and eventually claims Sara Louise's fishing buddy as her adoring fiancee. Set during World War II, the story builds slowly to a powerful and believable climax in which Sara Louise realizes that she can come out of the shadows by leaving her family and the island behind. Narrator Christina Moore is more than equal to the difficult task of telling the story from Sara Louise's viewpoint by sounding resentful at times, but never resorting to an unbroken bitterness that would become grating. Her Sara Louise is understandably human with energy, intelligence, and wit that causes listeners to side with and believe in her. The island setting has more than its share of salty, Bible pounding characters, and Moore is able to capture them. All libraries will benefit from owning this outstanding telling of a remarkable tale.‘Carol R. Katz, Harrison Public Library, NJ (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Booklist Review

Plain Louise feels deprived of schooling, friends, mother, and even her name by her pretty twin sister. (O 1 80)

Kirkus Book Review

We meet Louise Bradshaw in the summer of 1941, smarting under the disproportionate attention lavished on her fragile, musically talented twin sister Caroline since their birth 13 years earlier. We get to know her better the next summer when she and her cumbersome male friend Cal take up with old ""Captain"" Wallace, a 70-year-old native of their Chesapeake Island who has returned after a 50-year absence. Louise resents Cal's special relationship with the Captain, and resents even more her sister's subsequent friendship with both Cal and the Captain. She is devastated when the Captain offers to send Caroline off to music school; and when Cal and the other young men go off to war, Louise willingly drops out of high school to help her waterman father with the crabs and oysters. Perhaps the biggest blow is when Cal returns from the war all grown up, and announces his intention of marrying Caroline, now off at Juilliard. The interesting aspect of all Louise's torment and self-sacrifice is the growing realization that it isn't being forced on her. But not until she has settled down as a nurse-midwife (the only medical help) in a small Appalachian community--marrying a man with three children to boot--does she recognize and freely accept that she was destined to fulfill herself in a life of service. Paterson has to get into these later years to make the point, and to avoid the instant realizations that substitute in too many juvenile novels. However, this tends to flatten the tone and blur the shape of the novel. Louise's earlier, intense feelings evoke recognition and sympathy, but this hasn't the resonant clarity of Bridge to Terabitha or The Great Gilly Hopkins. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.