Customer Reviews

Jimmy's Girl

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This surprisingly well written first novel jumps between the two perspectives of former sweethearts. Gertler does a great job mixing important back-story details from when the characters were teens thirty years earlier into each of the two narratives as she pushes the present-day stories forward. Too often back-story is written (and edited) without much thought, simply as a device to provide details to tie things together. But in Jimmy's Girl, the back-story is more important than the present and is written with power. This book took me by surprise. I was fortunate enough to receive an advance copy and expected to read only a couple of chapters, but ended up finishing it in two very enjoyable evenings.

I loved this book! It was so romantic! I couldn't put it down, yet I didn't want it to end! It is written beautifully. The characters become your friends. You can feel their pain and their joy. It is both funny and sad without trying to be either. When the book was over I felt like I had lost a good friend. I have recommended it to all my friends, and any of them that have read it have also loved it; mothers AND daughters. It is a timeless , beautiful story. I can't wait to see what this promising new authors next book is about.

Emily feels neglected (she is), James feels he made some wrong choices (he did). But Emily carries "what if" one step further. She looks James up on the internet and phones him. He was her first love and they thought they had a future together until he went into the Marines and then to Vietnam. They arrange to meet each other for a weekend in Washington,DC. It's a little (a lot) unrealistic that their spouses don't put up more of a fuss but I guess if they did, the book would have been much shorter. In any case, they DO meet again and then it REALLY gets interesting.

If you like a book about relationships and second chances, you won't go wrong with this one.

I started to read this on my commuter train and was really annoyed when we got to my station (that's the true sign of a good book). I just found myself getting more and more deeply involved in the story, the people, the relationship, the outcome. I think the author has done a wonderful job at writing something that is so hard to put down.

Jimmy's Girl is the story of two people who look back to their teen romance to fill a hole that is missing in their lives 30 years later. The story is told in alternating chapters from Jimmy's view and then Emily's view so the reader can see the differences in man vs. woman perspective. I like the concept, but felt the effect fell short in that the differences weren't written strongly enough to capture any real significance. The shortcoming leaves the reader feeling like they are reading a recap of what they just read in the previous chapter. It also seems that the book is weighed just as heavily on what the experience of war is like for a soldier as much as it is on trying to dig up a lost romance and the romance is definitely the more intriguing part of the story. I was also somewhat disappointed with the choices that the characters made, but in honesty they are probably realistic choices. The premise of this novel was excellent, but I felt that there was too much missing to make it as good as it could have been.

Emily Hudson has a settled life. He husband is successful, her children happy, and she is able to pursue her love of painting. She is haunted by the memories of her first love, Jimmy Moran. They spent one wonderful year together, until Jimmy was shipped out to book camp, and then left for Vietnam. The memories of a brief meeting, between bootcamp and Vietnam haunt Emily, and she wonders what if? Jimmy has his own life, married and father of one. His quiet life is inturrupted when Emily contacts him. They decide to meet, Emily expalaining she needs help with a series of paintings she is beginning. The story alternates between the two of them, telling of the memories, the indecision, the fallout with family. There is so much truth in the emotions described, the thoughts you have at certain points in life, "is this how it was meant to be, what if I had followed my first love"? This is a masterful first novel, giving voice to an emotion that many of us have when we reach midlife. Stephanie Gertler has crafted a wonderful story of trying to return to your first love. That time when you were so alive with love and belief that you could face anyrhing together. What rings most true is the characters themselves, the emotions, the choices they eventually make. The characters remain true to the selves we come to know. I was so sad to finish this book, I hope there are more books to follow.

I'm usually a reader of best sellers. I grab the latest paperback from the grocery store shelf and read a few chapters when I find the time. It takes me forever, since I only manage to find snippets of uninterrupted time here and there. So it was a bit unusual for me in the first place to search for a book in hardcover by a newly published writer. I knew Jimmy's Girl was about finding a first love. Being the romantic that I am, how could I resist? And so it was with fingers crossed that I picked up Jimmy's Girl and began reading. WOW! Two hours later....I never put it down until I finished the last word. Stephanie Gertler spins a tale that actually left me speechless. She spoke to my heart. She touched my soul. Her story of a woman, married with children, finding the need for something..anything..to rekindle those feelings of first love, passion, hope, and the excitement that one feels waking up to another day in love. Even with a husband of 25 years. I look forward to reading a lot more of Gertler's work.

The simplified story-line of Jimmy's Girl is boy meets girl, boy and girl lose each other, girl finds boy again. In reality, the book is about much deeper issues that we all face at some point in our lives. I read Jimmy's Girl shortly after going through tumultuous midlife changes of my own, and I found it very easy to relate to the characters. Emily feels trapped by the comfortable life she has created for herself. Her children have occupied her thoughts for so long that in some ways she has lost sight of who she really is, so inevitably her mind wanders back to who she was before husband and family. She daydreams of her first love, Jimmy, and manages to find him through the internet. They meet again, and then both have to make decisions which will affect not only the two of them but their respective families. I think the real theme of this sweetly sad book is how seemingly insignificant things can change the direction in which our lives move. The wrong look, a missed phone call, a forgotten anniversary, these are the trivia which ultimately drive us to make the decisions which affect us. We all wonder "what if" when our lives are not going as we had hoped. Stephanie Gertler's characters have the guts to try to find out.

This book brought me right back -- to the Vietnam Era, to high school, to my first crush and my first love and my first experiments with physical intimacy. Gertler's writing is melodic, her choice of memories a mirror of my own. Everything she writes makes you nod with understanding. When the book ended, I felt empty...I wasn't ready to return. Here's hoping Gertler continues to write about coming of age.

Like some of the other on-line reviewers, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Like many of them, I believe the author took on a difficult task. Like one of them, I believe the book is a little unrealistic. Let me explain. This must be many people's dream book: a tale of going back, you can go home again to your first (and only?) love. The author entices us and makes the premise exciting and believable.

Still, there are questions, painful questions. One of them revolves around the resolution. Emily resolves what she has to resolve, to keep Jimmy at the center of her heart in a special position, a more special position, than anybody perhaps, FOREVER. After all, as the author/narrator astutely realizes, she has no other choice. Somehow, though, this resolution, as authentic (because it is bitter) as it is, contradicts and is at odds with not the meaning but the tone of her reuniting with Jimmy, her first and last love. Their entire "reunion" is not narrated or described to show it as exciting as even the well worn, worn out (?) marriage with her husband. If this is not deliberate, then it's a failure of writing. A more serious and more difficult to understand decision the author made is to mainstream (Protestantize) the characters. The characters have ethnic souls if not ethnic identities. Yet Jimmy's girl sounds like the most elemental of the fifties songs we all remember and loved. They were so wonderful, so all of us, so American. Yet Emily, New York City schooled with an Uptown New York City soul, is as far from Ames, Iowa as one can imagine. Jimmy is immersed in and married to soulful Mobile, Alabama. Why, then, do Jimmy and Emily have to be squeezed into an Everly Brother's "Cathy's Clown" scenario? I don't think it's the author's intention or control at work.

I still enjoyed the book, as you will, but it convinced me NOT to contact my "sweetheart" from 1960. If Ms. Gertler's writing is any sign, a re-creation, renewal, or simply review of the relationship can never, never live up to the original, and I don't want the hurt of confirming that truth.