Katherine Paterson is probably (?) best known for Bridge to Terebitha, but I recommend you to Jacob Jacob I Loved, too. Particularly if you have some sense that your life is fated and you have no choice but to Do What You Are Doing. Here’s a book – for young people, for old people, for people-people – that brings to attention the way we choose, or might be able to choose, or choose despite our constraints, the kind of person we want to be and the life we want to live.
In this case we follow twin sisters where one, Caroline, is spectacularly precious and adored, and the other, Sara Louise, who – well, let’s admit that the limited narration might open questions about its reliability – isn’t. And how Sara finds around her evidence of a narrative of who she thinks she is and what she can become, ever believing this to be true and letting this story limit what she will let herself imagine for her life or for her capabilities. And so the book through the (eventual) shifting of this self narration shows the young adult reader the power of the story we tell about ourselves. That to be who we want to become a big part of it is is declaring who we think we can and could be.
It runs up, of course, against the usual ‘choice amid constraints’ without ignoring these – Sara Louise, in choosing her future, has to make sacrifices of family and future that her parents may have wanted, choices that come with economic repercussions, and significantly, force her to see the ways she has externalized her own sense of limitation. So yes, we can’t choose to be anything we want, or can’t choose anything without consequence, but, the book says, we have more choices than we imagine.
