Josie and Jack: A Novel [Paperback]

Kelly Braffet (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 4, 2005

In Josie and Jack, Kelly Braffet gives us a deliciously dark, suspenseful debut novel in the tradition of Patricia Highsmith.
Beautiful, brilliant, and inseparable, Josie and Jack Raeburn live a secluded, anarchic existence in their decaying western Pennsylvania home. The only adult in their lives is their rage-prone father, a physicist, whose erratic behavior finally drives them away. Without a moral compass to guide them, Jack leads Josie into a menacing world of wealth, eroticism, and betrayal. His sociopathic tendencies emerge, and soon Josie must decide which is stronger: the love and devotion she feels for her brother or her will to survive.
From its opening page to its shocking climax, this contemporary Hansel and Gretel story is compulsively readable and hugely entertaining.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Braffet's creepy, captivating debut has a quote from Hansel and Gretel as its epigram, but the novel owes as much to Flowers in the Attic as it does to the fairy tale. Josie and Jack Raeburn are inseparable teenagers virtually raising themselves in a decaying Pennsylvania mansion. Intermittently and bizarrely home-schooled by their abusive father, a mad physics professor who lives at his college during the week, the isolated siblings are left mostly to their own vices—drinking, smoking and sleeping in the same bed. It's a weird but almost innocent existence, until Jack persuades Josie to seduce the pharmacist's son, Kevin, so they can score some drugs. When Josie falls for Kevin, Jack beats him senseless because he can't bear to share her. But because gorgeous, brilliant, magnetic Jack is the only person who's ever shown Josie love, she persists in her blind devotion to him. After a startling betrayal of their father, Jack and Josie leave home and leech off a string of women whom Jack easily, cruelly charms. But the women grow suspicious of the siblings' relationship, with good reason. Things can only end badly, of course, which happens when Lily, Jack's latest victim, confronts him about their atypical relationship. Braffet's sharp portrait of an asphyxiating love and a legacy of madness is darkly gothic and supremely readable.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

The siblings Josie, age 16, and Jack, 18, in Braffet's haunting debut are unusually close. Their mother is long dead, and their arrogant father is a university professor who rages and fumes about the ills of mankind. Josie sees Jack as her whole world, but gradually he forces her to go out in the world, first to seduce Kevin, the son of a local pharmacist. But Josie starts to develop real feelings for Kevin, and Jack reacts with a powerful rage and envy. When a confrontation with their father causes Jack to take off, Josie is devastated. She feels as though she's lost her anchor, but it isn't long before he comes back for her, to take her to live with him in Erie, Pennsylvania, where he is staying with a girl named Becka. But Josie and Jack's relationship has never been one to permit outsiders for long, and soon the pair is adrift and headed for disaster. Braffet's first novel packs a powerful punch, and readers won't soon forget the chilling, unexpected ending. Kristine Huntley
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books (February 4, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0618441433
• ISBN-13: 978-0618441433
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,040,163 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I'm the author of Last Seen Leaving and Josie and Jack (known in the UK as Fabulous Things, which is confusing, but you'd be surprised by what writers don't get to decide about their books, really you would). I can be found on the web in the following places (sorry, Amazon doesn't allow links):

www.kellybraffet.com
www.facebook.com/kellybraffetfiction
and at Goodreads, here: http://preview.tinyurl.com/7lnr9ho

Here is a helpful guide to helpfully help you decide which of my books might be right for you.

Do you suffer from ghastly hangovers and chronic frustration at the lack of ghastly hangovers in your reading material? Check out Josie and Jack.

Do you like tacos? Check out Last Seen Leaving.

Do stories about abandoned cats being rescued by kind strangers make you happy? Check out Last Seen Leaving.

Do stories about abandoned sisters being rescued by not-so-kind brothers make you happy? Check out Josie and Jack.

Do you like unicorns? Me, too. Sorry, though. Wrong writer. Try Peter S. Beagle. He's really good.

Do you want to read a book where I prove that I can research math and physics? Josie and Jack.

Do you want to read a book where I prove that I can research New Age spirituality and the CIA? Last Seen Leaving.

Do you want to be taken away on a magical journey full of wonder and amazement? Me, too. Wrong writer again, though. Damn it!

Do you want to be taken away on a dark journey full of ambient creepiness and vivid descriptions of smells? Right, that's totally me. Either book, really.

Do you want to read a story wherein an unlucky waitress consumes pudding? Check out my short story, "Bad Karma Girl Wins At Bingo," in the anthology Who Can Save Us Now? Brand New Superheroes and Their Amazing (Short) Stories.

Do you want to read a story wherein an imprisoned serial-killing countess consumes stale bread and throws dead rats at people? Check out my short story, "The Pulley," in the Aquamarine Issue of the Fairy Tale Review.

Do you want to read about what a self-obsessed, pretentious dork I was in high school? Check out my essay, "F@ck High School," in the anthology When I Was A Loser.

Do you want to read about what self-obsessed, pretentious dorks other people were in high school? Check out Catcher in the Rye and the Chocolate War.

Do you want to read a really good book about independent film? Check out my husband's book, Reenactment. Out in 2013.

Do you want to read a book about blond people? Josie and Jack.

Do you want to read a book about people who dye their hair unnatural colors? Last Seen Leaving.

Do you want to read a book about a Led Zeppelin fan who works in a convenience store and a waitress who has dark thoughts about lobster and two goth evangelical Christian sisters and a really big shiny truck and another guy who named himself after a Roman emperor and yet another guy who draws wolves all the time? Then run to the nearest publisher, bang stridently on the desk of the first editor you come to, and refuse to leave until I sell my next novel. Thanks.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A "Wait a minute" story..., February 18, 2005

By 

P. B. Duey "missysauntie" (ARIZONA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Josie and Jack: A Novel (Paperback)

In the west is a scraggly. scratchy bush that snags as you walk by it- and holds you within its grasp- we jokingly call it a "Wait a minute" bush...Josie and Jack is a "Wait a minute" book for the same reasons- it snags you from the first paragraph- holds you securely and won't let you go til you finish the book as quickly as possible. Darkly consuming and very addictive- Kelly Braffet is the new literary drug! A very good read proving story telling is still alive and well. Bravo!!

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Dark Siblings in a Dark Story, February 25, 2005

By 

sb-lynn (Santa Barbara, California United States) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Josie and Jack: A Novel (Paperback)

This is a very good first novel, by author Kelly Braffet. The story is centered around siblings Jack and Josie.

The plot, no spoilers...

The story starts out with a description of 19 year old Jack, and 17 year old Josie. They are the exceptionally attractive children of an eccentric, rage filled professor, and a deceased, mentally ill mother. They live with the professor in isolation, in an old home on a hill, where they have been home schooled.

The story really takes off when these two decide to leave home....

This is a dark story, and is a like a mix of the works of V.C. Andrews, and Ruth Rendell.

There is a sense of impending doom throughout the book, as we follow the story of the charismatic Jack, and the shy Josie.

For those who like psychological thrillers, and tales of eccentric, sociopathic and wounded people who lose control of their lives, this is definitely the book for you.

Recommended, and I am looking for to Braffet's next book.

18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Relationship In A Bottle, March 20, 2005

By 

Dr Lawrence Hauser (NYC, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Josie and Jack: A Novel (Paperback)

Isolated and incestuous, Josie and Jack are inseparable teenage siblings who when faced with the necessity to function in a larger world stumble disastrously. Their story of hermetic love fueled by wanton self-indulgence of epic proportionality takes place in the almost complete absence of parenting. Mother, whose elusive presence in the lives of her children is magnified by her absence, has obliterated herself suicidally when Josie and Jack are four and six years of age respectively. And their frighteningly abusive, megalomaniacal father is home only on weekends throughout the years when guidance and care are so critical to the development of character and the values by which to structure one's life. Furthermore, the children are excused from attending school as father delusionally believes that what he has to impart in the way of grandiose instruction of esoteric, paranoidly tinged subject matter somehow suffices as a curriculum with which to prepare his offspring for their future lives. The mix of perverse love kindled in a vacuum, prodigious amounts of alcohol and pharmaceuticals, and misguided efforts to promote and protect a precious sense of overweening self-importance in this truncated family of three inevitably detonates in Kelly Braffet's first novel in ways that never fail to surprise and astonish. Braffert has crafted an exhilarating narrative that speeds toward its explosive conclusion just as a car driven by an intoxicated madman might careen down the wrong direction of a six lane superhighway. To say the least, Josie And Jack is keenly observed, psychologically astute, and deadly accurate in its depiction of what will transpire when children are led to buy into the lie that they are so special they can function outside of natural law. Transgression as an expression of disdain for basic limits in interpersonal relations almost always ends in exquisite suffering and emotional chaos. With Kelly Braffet we encounter a master at delineating this splintered terrain of pain and ineluctable sorrow.