Jacob Have I Loved

On the small fictional Chesapeake Bay island of Rass during the nineteen forties, Sara Louise Bradshaw, called Wheeze, has spent her whole life certain she lives in the shadow of her twin sister Caroline, whose delicate health as a baby and obvious musical talent as she grows have made her the family's clear favorite. While Caroline receives singing lessons and, eventually, a scholarship to study at Juilliard, Louise works the water alongside her father and her friend Call, catching crabs and oysters, resentful but unable to say so out loud. Her one real romance, an unspoken devotion to Hiram Wallace, an older islander known as the Captain who returns to Rass after decades away, ends in disappointment when he marries someone else entirely, another blow Louise absorbs largely alone. When Call comes home from the Second World War changed and announces plans to marry Caroline himself, it becomes the final push Louise needs to finally demand a life of her own rather than a life spent orbiting her sister's. She leaves the island, is turned away from medical school by gender discrimination and by veterans given priority under the GI Bill, and becomes a nurse midwife instead, eventually settling in Appalachia and marrying a widower with children of his own. The novel closes years later with Louise delivering twins herself, rushing the weaker infant to warmth first while the stronger one waits, a small act that finally answers, on her own terms, the old unfairness the title's Bible verse names.

Reading it is quiet and interior, narrated by an adult Louise looking back with more understanding than she had at the time, and Paterson lets her bitterness toward Caroline stay genuinely unattractive for most of the book rather than softening it early, which is exactly what makes Louise's eventual, hard won peace with herself feel earned rather than given to her.