"Pop beating up Mr. Kellner was, I think, the beginning of it all. We bear primal anxieties about our fathers, and it's tough to witness your pop beat up a pipe-smoking gentleman from the next street over."
Those lines sum up a pivotal moment in Stephen Wetta's debut novel, If Jack's in Love. When Jack Witcher--12 years old but narrating from an older, wiser place--witnesses his unemployed mechanic father challenge their more sophisticated neighbor to an ill-advised fight, a chain of events is set in motion that defines the rest of the story and Jack's adolescence.
It's 1967, and Jack and his family are social pariahs in their small Southern town. His father is rough, his long-suffering mother is kind but ugly, and his brother is a long-haired, pot-smoking, Doors-listening hippie with violent tendencies. But Jack is smart and sensitive, and he finds a friend in Mr. Gladstein, another outsider and the town's only Jew. With Mr. Gladstein's help, Jack is determined to win the love of his beautiful classmate Myra. But then Myra's older brother is murdered--and Jack's older brother is the prime suspect.
The cultural growing pains of the '60s mirror Jack's own coming-of-age as he struggles to reconcile his love for Myra with his brother's likely guilt. While Wetta shies away from giving the story the depth it could have and has a tendency to resort to clichés, If Jack's in Love is a charming, lively debut. --Hannah Calkins, blogger at Unpunished Vice