In the year 2001, Todd, an acclaimed painter with work in museums around the world and a seemingly successful thirty-year marriage to the Brahmin Emily, is living and painting in his two-hundred year-old Massachussetts farmhouse when his youngest child, Jack, chooses the Marines over college. Feeling puzzled and ultimately infuriated by his son's incomprehensible switch to “the other side,” a situation only further aggravated by his disapproval of Jack's “townie” fiancée, Todd ultimately turns his back on his son. Not long after the start of Gulf War II, Jack is deployed to Iraq and is killed two-and-a-half weeks later, trying to fend off an ambush.
From this point on, Baby Jack tells the story of the family Jack leaves behind — his parents trying each to survive in their own way as their marriage shatters, of Todd's tortured breakdown and after-the-fact attempt to understand and relive his son's life, of Jack's widow's perserverance, and of the baby Jack left behind, which his fiancée gives birth to three months after Jack's death.
Baby Jack is a powerful and moving human story, which takes it readers into a territory way beyond the every day.
Genre: Literary Fiction
From this point on, Baby Jack tells the story of the family Jack leaves behind — his parents trying each to survive in their own way as their marriage shatters, of Todd's tortured breakdown and after-the-fact attempt to understand and relive his son's life, of Jack's widow's perserverance, and of the baby Jack left behind, which his fiancée gives birth to three months after Jack's death.
Baby Jack is a powerful and moving human story, which takes it readers into a territory way beyond the every day.
Genre: Literary Fiction
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