Customer Reviews

As Always, Jack: A Wartime Love Story

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This book is awesome!!! Jack is the most amazing man you will ever meet, even if it is only through his letters and his daughter's words. His letters were romantic, moving, funny, and inspiring. Every woman should read this book if for no other reason that to see an example of how she deserves to be treated and loved. This book is absolute perfection.

Sometimes I crave a simple, old-fashioned book. With nice people I'd like to meet. With only one plot, so I don't have to remember who's who in the cast. And with a moral that makes me feel good to be alive.

Not an easy book to find.

So I was happy to be alerted to the simple goodness of a short --- 179-page --- book of letters. The author of the book is Emma Sweeney, who is, of all things, a literary agent. The author of the letters is Jack Sweeney, the father she never knew.

The 45 letters tell of Jack's courtship of Beebe Mathewson. He is "Episcopalian, Democrat, Texan, Irish, bat right-handed, throw right-handed, detest cauliflower and sweet potatoes, and took an oath when I was five years old to devote my life to making blondes happy." Beebe is a blonde, from Coronado, California. They met shortly after the end of World War II, just 11 days before the Navy ships Jack off to Hawaii.

What we know at the beginning of the book: Beebe and Jack will marry. They will have four sons. A decade later, when Jack is a Navy pilot stationed in Bermuda, he will fly off one day and disappear. His plane will never be found. Months later, Beebe will give birth to one more child --- Emma.

It is one thing to know your father as a dim memory. It is quite another never to know him at all, to wonder what he was like, to be haunted by the possibility that he was never aware he was going to have a daughter. Emma Sweeney lived with those questions for decades. Then her mother died --- and in the back of a drawer, Emma found the letters her father wrote during their first separation.

These are letters of courtship, unlike any others collected from military men who have died. Jack starts slow and shy and carefully ironic: "I've never seen a more beautiful sight than you sitting across that table in candlelight, surrounded by filet mignons and profiteroles. Why couldn't I have met you when you were young?" (Beebe was then 23.) He is encouraged by her response: "This letter of yours was the biggest thing that's happened in my life since I left the USA." (Sadly, Beebe's letters have been lost.) He starts to let her into his life: golf, cards, reading, work, movies, silly jokes. And we, in turn, start to imagine what it's like to be on the receiving end of these letters --- you cannot help but think that this is a damn nice guy.

Within five months, he's closing hard: "I was brought up by the same kind of people you were, Beebe --- people who believe that when two people are married, they're the same as one person, and everybody else is on the outside." Well, if that isn't laying it on the line. Reading that, did your heart pound? Mine did.

The letters pile up, then stop abruptly --- for on the next page is a wedding announcement. There was no time for invitations; the wedding was held just three weeks after Jack's return from Hawaii. Because they knew. They just did. And Beebe and Jack were right; they were happy together. Right up to that moment in 1956 when he died.

Emma reads through the letters, and does some digging, and finds out one fact that her mother had never revealed to her. It will make you cry --- sudden, hot, brief tears. And you'll cry again when you read Jack's "last letter", written just a few days before his death. Which is just as it should be. A love story with a sad ending, and then a new chapter with a little girl....that's classic material.

I read such stylish, sophisticated, brilliant books. I stretch to understand them, to be worthy of them. And here is this slim volume, so simple, so tender. The point couldn't be more obvious. And yet it too is a stretch. Maybe a bigger one. Maybe a much bigger one.

Did you ever wish you could meet the perfect man, the kind of man who has a sense of humour, who is intelligent, who talks about his feelings, and who writes you the kind of love letters that not only make you feel gooier than a marshmallow but also restore your faith in all mankind? Well, Jack IS that man! As I read his letters, I couldn't help but fall wholeheartedly in love with him. In fact, I don't think any woman could read this and not fall in love with Jack. He's even dreamier than a year's worth of the R.E.M. stage of sleep.

Jack should have been a writer, if only he'd lived long enough. He had the gift of the gab in spades. His letters, written off the cuff, are better than the writing you find in books that writers have spent years refining and rewriting.

But most of all, Jack is a true romantic. Seriously, I think this is about the best love story I have ever read. If you have a soft spot in your heart for true romance, if you like nothing more than a love story, then all I can say is READ THIS BOOK! And the best thing about it is, Jack's not fictitious. He really lived. Knowing that there really are men like this in the world, who aren't just invented by some writer of fiction, will really gladden your heart, just as it did mine.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough. It is definitely in my list of top ten books of all time.

This review is for the Back Bay paperback edition, April 2003. This small book with wide margins might take you as long as four hours to read, provided someone interrupts you frequently.

On April 25, 1946, Lieutenant John Milton Sweeney, in a letter to his sweetheart, wrote, "You'd know what I meant, but how about the people who'll read this forty years from now in `Famous Letters of Famous Naval Heroes' compiled by Lt. J. M. Sweeny, USN (Retired)?" John, a.k.a. Jack, married his sweetheart on July 26 of that year, and she bore him four sons, but he did not retire. On November 9, 1956, while his wife was pregnant with their forth child, Emma Sweeney, his plane plunged into the Atlantic killing all aboard.

Lt. Sweeney met his sweetheart on December 29, 1945. They dated for the next eleven days and then Jack shipped out to the Pacific. During the next six months, he courted and won his girl through forty-five poignant and sometimes humorous letters. Shortly after Emma's mother died in 1985, just about forty years later, Emma Sweeney found those letters. Through them, she learned about the father she never knew. In AS ALWAYS JACK, she shares those letters and a touching story.

Emma Sweeny never knew her father Jack, a navy pilot who died before she was born. One day, she found a collection of love letters her father wrote to her mother. With each letter, the reader joins Sweeny in a journey through time, witnessing a young man fall in love with a blond he met at a dance and glimpsing into his life as a navy pilot. At times cocky and playful or sensitive and insightful, Jack is always interesting. Dramatic irony makes this intensely touching and a great read.

This is hands down my favorite book. Ever. I picked it up in Barnes & Noble and read it cover to cover in an hour, couldn't put it down. And after I'd finished it, I bought it so I could read it again. It's so fun to get lost in these romantic letters, and knowing this is a true story of how a daughter came to know her father after his death makes the discovery and publishing of these letters that much more special. Emma Sweeney's commentary in setting up the story and rounding it off in the end is absolutely perfect. This is the only time I have ever been inspired to write an author a letter after reading a book. Read this book. You will laugh. You will cry. And then you'll read it again :)

To read Jack Sweeney's boisterous, witty, guileless, and absolutely adorable letters is to fall in love with what is good, lovely, and right in the world. Emma Sweeney, Jack's youngest child who was yet unborn when her father died, allows us to discover her father--as she did--through these letters.

His letters sparkle as will you when reading them!

I purchased this book for a friend of mine whose husband was also named Jack Sweeney. She is also his widow and the mother of his five sons. With so many similarities I couldn't resist getting this for her. After the book arrived I had time to glance through it myself and found myself reading it from cover to cover! It puts you back in time.
CL Pratt

Wow! I just finished reading this book and I can't even begin to describe how touching a beatiful this story is. What makes it even better is that it is all true. Even though you read mostly from Jack Sweeney's letters, you learn about both Jack, and Beebe in them. His letters made me laugh and makes you feel the same angst that he was feeling at not being able to be where his sweetheart is. The most incredible was the last letter of the book. It truly makes me believe, as it did with the author's mother, that the good Lord did indeed provide a way for Jack to say his last words as well as provide comfort to his family. This story is inspiring and shows what pure love is like as well as the more innocent and sweet times of the 1940s and 50s. I must admit that I keep thinking of the author and wishing that she, too, had the chance to know this man who sounds like a wonderful husband and father.

The book i chose to read was "As always Jack" by Emma Sweeney". The book was reprinted not so long ago in April 2003. Written in the 1940's.
There are not many characters in the book, just Jack and Beebe and their daughter. This book is mostly written in letter form by Jack who is a 26 year old navy pilot. After about only two weeks of being together their relationship gets stronger and the eventually fall in love.

The theme of the book is a middle aged women ( daughter of Beebe and Jack) discovers her father past and relationship with her
dead mother. Its a very sad and sympathetic novel. Also it leaves you feeling curious. To me it was curious because you never find out what ever happen to Jack. After his plane being reported as missing and him being lost in the Bermuda triangle his wife assumes he is dead. But no one really knows how he died, for example if he drowned or died of hunger. There was a little bit of foreshadowing also. Such as when Jack wrote a letter saying that if he passed away during his journey to never forget who he was and that is all he wanted..To be remembered. To me this was foreshadowing because in reality he did pass away but at least Beebe new what he wanted after he had passed away.

My favorite character is Jack. He is miles away from Beebe but still keeps in touch with her by written to her continuously. He can be an inspiration or role model for middle age men, for his caring and loving even thought he won't be able to see his loved ones within months. It made me feel so sad reading those letters because he would inform to Beatrice that he has reached a different country and what he did their and who he met. But Beebe only wrote to him a few letters and to me that is not fair, because he took time to write those letters and she only replied to about 5 of them.

Their daughter never even got to meet her father or even get a chance to see what he looked like. There's was a small picture
she had but his face was so blurry in the picture she couldn't see her resemblance to him.
My favorite part of the book was when she finally found out that her father new she was going to be born and at least had a thought of her and how she would grow up to be. This brought a smile to my face because the daughter was always worried that her father didn't even know she existed or was going to exist. So now she didn't feel lost anymore she knew what her past was.
I strongly do recommend this novel because it puts you in an uncomfortable place you don't want to be in but it also lets you know how it was so many years ago and how it is not to grow up with a father and not even have a clue to who he was.