5 reasons I’ve Read Jacqueline Woodson’s If You Come Softly 5 times

By rachelsarah / December 4, 2017 at 2:00 pm

If You Come Softly

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One of my close friends, a middle school English teacher, was surprised to hear that I’d never read Jacqueline Woodson’s If You Come Softly, and now I see why she urged me to pick this story up. I’ve now read this novel so many times, I’ve become the one who’s pleading others to give this beautiful, thoughtful love story a chance.

Here are my reasons I’ve reread Woodson’s If You Come Softly so many times:

1. Because the writing is so beautiful, lyrical, sparse, and heartbreaking! You can almost touch every sentence on the page. For example, here’s how Chapter One begins:

“Jeremiah was black. He could feel it. The way the sun pressed down hard and hot on his skin in the summer. Sometimes it felt like he sweated black beads of oil. He felt warm inside his skin, protected.”

2. Because I’m the white mother of a black daughter, and for the couple years of her life, we lived in Washington Heights in New York City, where this story takes place. Woodson so easily flows between the voices of her main characters, Elisha, an upper-middle-class white girl who has just transferred to an elite prep school, and Jeremiah, one of her few black classmates, whose celebrity parents have recently separated.

3. Because Woodson is a pro at dual point-of-view (Elisha in first person, Jeremiah in third person) as these two characters approach a dramatic heart-wrenching climax.

4. Because I’m Jewish, like Elisha, and my first boyfriend in a suburban high school was black, and I remember how people stared at us when we walked around the neighborhood holding hands. Like Jeremiah and Elisha, I recall that eagerness to discover how different we were, but also how much we both desired to feel heard and seen and loved.

5. Because even if this story was first published 1998, it’s as timely as ever, as Woodson describes a senseless act of violence that stunned me. As she says on her website:

“I wrote If You Come Softly because I wanted to write about first love—how hard it can be and how great it is. I also wanted to write about being fifteen because I remember that age very well. As I was writing it, I came across some lines from Romeo and Juliet and realized this story was a modern-day Romeo and Juliet. The enemies to Jeremiah and Ellie’s love are racism, police brutality and people’s general stupidity. I also wanted to write about Time—about how fleeting it is….”

Have you read If You Come Softly?