Module 4: Jacob Have I Loved & Out of the Dust

 Jacob Have I Loved

by Katherine Paterson

Summary: Beginning at birth, twin Louise better known as Wheesie, lives in the shadow of her younger sister Caroline.  Due to her fragile state at birth, Caroline always received more attention than Louise and was often given more privileges.  Louise got to leave their island home of Rass to go into town to have piano lessons.  Louise never left Rass and spent most of her time playing with her dear friend Call.  When a stranger arrives in town, Louise believes he is a spy and convinces Call to help her discover the stranger's identity.  They soon discover he is a Captain whose family once lived on the island.  Louise isn't crazy about the Captain and doesn't think his jokes are funny, but Call instantly clicks with the Captain.  Out of fear of losing her one friend, she continues to visit the Captain with Call and eventually forms a crush on him.  Louise soon loses all the things important to her.  Call gets deployed to fight in the war, the Captain marries Trudy Braxton, and Caroline gets sent to boarding school for her vocals.  When Call finally returns from the war, Louise has decided she love him and awaits his arrival only to discover he is engaged to her sister.  The Captain encourages Louise to move away and follow her dreams.  Louise does follow her dreams and becomes a nurse.  She eventually find true happiness when she marries and begins a family of her own.

Paterson, K. (1980).  Jacob have I loved. New York, NY: Thomas Y. Crowell Junior Books.

My Impression:  At the time it was written, Katherine Paterson did an excellent job of portraying a modern day story of Jacob and Esau.  This book was interesting and I found myself pulling for Louise in her attempt to find happiness.  The plot of this story moves along a little slowly.  I found the crush Louise had on the Captain to be a little strange, but it did help to develop the senile grandmother's character.  Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed this book and feel it would be best for middle and high school students.  That being said, I give this book a B for kids.

Professional Review:

School Library Journal

GR 7-10: First-born twin Louise, the narrator, is the somber sister of the sunny, sensible musical prodigy Caroline.  Envy and jealously darken Louise's life and trap her  in a web of unhappiness as isolating as the waters that both imprison and protect Rass, a Chesapeake Bay island, and its population-descendants of generations of watermen whose grim hard life is centered in the sea and in the church.  Louise's unhappiness makes her anxious to please, easily crushed by unthinking friends, unable to accept as true the very real, though unexpressed, love of her parents.  When Caroline's chance comes to leave the island-her musical talent a tickets to the world-Louise's bitterness turns further inward, and when WWII takes Call, her oldest and dearest friend, her loneliness is devastating.   The war years find Louise doing a man's job as she helps her father, a crab fisherman, with a silent strength that matches his own and draws them together in mutual need. The carefully built facade of content is shattered after the war when Call, with whom she thinks she is in love, leaves the island to marry Caroline not even realizing the hurt he leaves behind.  What might have precipitated final personal destruction becomes, for Louise, the impetus to finally leave the island and make a satisfying future for herself as well as peace with the past.  Told with Louise's poignant dignity, this is different-more complex, more subtle- than Paterson's other novels.  A new and older audience will find it affecting, however.

Lewis, M. (1980). Jacob have I loved [Review of the book Jacob have I loved by Katherine Paterson]. School Library Journal, 27(3), 87.  Retrieved from http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/

Library Uses:  This book would be a great read aloud when older students are learning about weather, particularly hurricanes. After reading the book aloud, students could determine the necessary steps that need to be taken for protection in the event of hurricane.  They could analyze the steps Louise's family took and compare them to what would happen now.

Out of the Dust

by Karen Hesse

Summary:  Set in Oklahoma in the mid thirties, Billie Joe is literally stuck in the dust.  Due to the lack of rain and excess of dust, Billie Joe's father is unable to get anything to grow.  Try as they might, it is nearly impossible to keep out the dust.  They leave their plate and glasses turned down on the table to prevent dust from entering them, they take other preventative measures as well.  One of the things that keeps Billie Joe going is playing the piano.  Coming from a refined background, Billie Joe's mother is a beautiful pianist and teacher her this skill.  Billi Joe's music is her way to connect with others at school.  Good news arrives for her family when they discover her mother is pregnant.  Things take a turn for the worst when Billie Joe's dad leaves a pail of kerosene on the stove which ends in both her and her mother covered in burns.  Shortly after, the baby is born both Billie Joe's mother and the new baby die.  In addition to this tragedy, Billie Joe's hands were burned so badly she can no longer play the piano.  Feeling as though there is nothing left for her but dust, Billie Joe runs away in an attempt to escape the dust.  When she hops a ride in a train car, she runs into someone else who has left their family behind.  This encounter causes her to realize that she must return home.  After she returns home, she and her father reconnect.  A school teacher enters their lives and teaches Billie Joe's dad that he can love again and teaches Billie Joe that their is a future for her family.

Hesse, K. (1997). Out of the dust. New York, NY: Scholastic Press.

My Impression:  I give this book an A+.  This historical fiction account of a family living in the Dust Bowl is an honest depiction of what imagine life must have been like.  Hesse pulls you in, making you feel as though you too are a part of this family.  This is a beautifully book written in free verse and is sure to spark interest in students leaving them wanting to learn more about what happened during this time period.

Professional Review:

Horn Book Magazine

Prairie winds dark with dust blow through this novel — turning suppers gritty, burying tractors, and scouring lungs. Even the pages of the book, composed solely of first-person, free-verse poems, have a windswept appearance as fourteen-year-old Billie Jo Kelby relates her Depression-era experiences in the Oklahoma panhandle: "We haven't had a good crop in three years, / not since the bounty of '31, / and we're all whittled down to the bone these days." Billie Jo's world is further devastated when a kitchen fire causes the deaths of her mother and newborn brother and severely injures her hands, stalling the fledgling pianist's dream of a music career. A few of the poems are pretentious in tone or facile in execution, and some of the longer, narrative-driven pieces strain at the free verse structure, but the distinctive writing style is nonetheless remarkably successful. Filled with memorable images — such as Billie Jo's glimpse of her pregnant mother bathing outdoors in a drizzle — the spare verses showcase the poetry of everyday language; the pauses between line breaks speak eloquently, if sometimes melodramatically. The focus of the entire book is not quite as concise. As tragedies pile up over the two-year timeline (a plague of grasshoppers descends, starving cattle need to be shot, Billie Jo's father develops skin cancer), the pace becomes slightly numbing. Billie Jo's aborted escape from the dust bowl almost gets lost in the procession of bleak events, instead of serving as the book's climax. Yet her voice, nearly every word informed by longing, provides an immediacy that expressively depicts both a grim historical era and one family's healing.

Sieruta, P.D. (1998). Out of the dust [Review of the book Out of the dust, by Karen Hesse]. Horn Book Magazine, 74(1), 73-74. Retrieved from http://www.hbook.com/

Library Uses:  This would be an excellent book to use during a history unit being taught on this time period.  After collaborating with a teacher, a lesson could be built using Out of the Dust and a non fiction book such as Children of the Dust Bowl: The True Story of the School and Weedpatch Camp by Jerry Stanley.  Student could identify the hardships faced by the characters in both stories and then compare and contrast the hardships that were faced.