If Jack's in Love

by Stephen Wetta

Overview

Every neighborhood has that house: The one with the broken down cars in the front yard; the one where the father is always out of work and starting fights with other dads;the one no one wants to go near. Twelve-year-old Jack Witcher lives in that house.

And that’s just where his problems begin.

It is 1967 and Jack’s father has lost his job, yet again. The war in Vietnam is perpetually on the news, and Jack is in love with a girl named Myra. But Myra’s family is the opposite of Jack’s. Her father is well dressed and well spoken. Her brother is the town’s golden boy. Jack schemes to win Myra’s love with the only person in town who will deign to be his friend, the town jeweler and sole Jew. But when Myra’s brother goes missing, Jack’s pot-smoking older brother becomes suspect number one...

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781101547854
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	09/29/2011
Sold by:	Penguin Group
Format:	eBook
Pages:	368
File size:	318 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Stephen Wetta is a native of Richmond, Virginia. He received his bachelor's degree from Virginia Commenwealth University and his PhD from New York University. He is currently an English professor at Hunter College. If Jack’s in Love is his first novel.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"A powerful story … Wetta captures with great charm and grit the joys and aches of a first love complicated by social boundaries and familial expectations…. a fast-moving tale.” —Lee Martin, author of The Bright Forever and Break the Skin

Editorial Reviews

Terrific…you should read this wonderfully written marvel of a book: a work both gripping and hilarious, joyous and heartbreakingly bittersweet.” —The Wall Street Journal

“It took Stephen Wetta fifty-five years to write his promising first novel … I only hope Mr. Wetta writes a little faster next time so I’ll be around to say I told you so.” —Pete Dexter

“This is a lovely, passionate, and compelling … a book you won’t want to put down.” —Winston Groom, author of Forrest Gump

“At turns unsparing, tender, and disturbing….intelligently, wonderfully conceived.” —Publisher’s Weekly, starred review

“Heartfelt, heartbreaking, suspenseful, and riveting… The novel, full of beautifully realized characters and predicaments, gets everything exactly right.” —Timothy Schaffert, award-winning author of The Coffins of Little Hope

“I loved this novel! Like To Kill a Mockingbird, Whistling in the Dark… Jack Witcher will charm you, break your heart . . . surprise you on nearly every page … [and] stay with you long after the final satisfying page.” —Katrina Kittle, author of The Blessings of the Animals

"A powerful story … Wetta captures with great charm and grit the joys and aches of a first love complicated by social boundaries and familial expectations…. a fast-moving tale.” —Lee Martin, author of The Bright Forever and Break the Skin

From the Publisher

"If Jack's in Love is a moving portrait of a specific time, family and town, but also a universal story of growing up and coming to terms with the people-and places-that raise us, told with all the humor, truth and urgency of its teenage hero. It may have taken the first half of his life to write, but Wetta's touching novel was well worth the wait."

BookPage

"...[Y]ou should read this wonderfully written marvel of a book: a work both gripping and hilarious, joyous and heartbreakingly bittersweet."

The Wall Street Journal

". . . terrific . . . raw and complicated . . . keeps us gripped until the end."

The Daily Beast

Caught between love and loyalty, young Jack cannot seem to make a decision that doesn't feel wrong.

In Wetta's debut novel, Jack is a Witcher, son of a sometime mechanic, sometime unemployed hillbilly father and a poor-but-respectable mother. The Witchers are trash, publicly labeled as such. Their house, with a maybe-useful commode in the mostly dirt yard, scars El Dorado Hills, a 1967 Virginia suburb where good folks like the Coghills, Joyners and Kellners worry about Vietnam and integration and wish the Witchers elsewhere. But soon-to-be-13 Jack loves Myra Joyner, and that's a problem. It happens too that Jack's older brother, long-haired, pot-smoking Stanley, hates Myra's bother, Duke University–bound Gaylord Joyner, recent usurper of good girl Courtney Blankenship's affections. Wetta's narrative weaves Jack's pursuit of Myra around Stan's tendency to bloody the nose of anyone who offers a slight, real or imagined, a trait inherited from Witcher senior. Jack's ally in his quest is another outsider, Moses Gladstein, a Jewish jeweler from New Jersey. Myra likes Jack, primarily because Jack is the school's smartest kid, and Stan has found a new love in Anya, hippie daughter of the Taylors, rich folk new in the neighborhood. The characters are realistic, especially the Witchers, even Stan, whose thin-skinned "Don't tread on me" attitude ranges beyond the borders of sanity. Witcher-snobs are drawn with less intensity, although the white-bread image of a newly enrolled Klansman named Pudding hits the mark. Gaylord goes missing, Stan is accused and the Witchers are shunned and harassed. Jack puzzles through the story, but the dichotomy between his intellectual superiority and pubescent emotional behavior sometimes seems off-kilter. Jack understands that "Families live on loyalty more than love..." It's the costs of loyalty that causes him pain.

In the vein ofTo Kill a Mockingbird,but about class rather than race, and lacking a bit of its righteous moral clarity.

Kirkus Reviews