As Always, Jack: A Wartime Love Story - Hardcover

Sweeney, Emma

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0316758582 ISBN 13: 9780316758581

Publisher: Little, Brown, 2002

Synopsis

Searching for the father she never knew, the author relates her discovery of a packet of letters detailing the romance between her father, Jack Sweeney, a young Navy pilot in WWII who died shortly before she was born, and her mother.

About this title

About the Author:

Emma Sweeney is a literary agent and garden book author. She divides her time between New York City and upstate New York.

From Publishers Weekly:

At the end of WWII, a 26-year-old navy pilot meets and falls in love with a beautiful California girl named Beebe. They have about two weeks together before he is shipped off to the South Pacific for six months. When he returns they marry, have four sons and 10 good years together before he, still in the military, is killed in a plane crash off Bermuda in 1956. At the time of his death, his wife was pregnant with a daughter. The daughter spends her life longing for information about the father she never knew. Years later, after her mother's death, the daughter finds a bundle of letters that her father wrote to her mother in the six months before their marriage. Those letters are presented along with a foreword and afterword by the daughter, Sweeney, now a New York literary agent and gardening book author. The letters portray a decent, kindhearted young man with a quirky sense of humor who is obviously in love. Aside from a few colloquialisms of the 1940s, they could have been written by any lovesick military man in history. They are often corny, sometimes boring (as they only partially open doors into the psyches driving this old-fashioned romantic correspondence) and never erotic (not even suggestive unless "Greetings, my scandalous Scandinavian" counts). While these letters are obviously very precious to the woman who discovered them, they don't offer much character development or anything unique. (Apr. 10)Forecast: While war correspondence is a crowded subgenre, this attractively packaged little book (5" 7") has a blurb from War Letters editor Andrew Carroll and a planned tour that includes a stop at Annapolis. With more than 1.5 million members of the U.S. Armed Forces, it has a ready audience alert to the perils of separation, along with many more sympathetic to that predicament.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Little, Brown
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0316758582
• ISBN 13: 9780316758581
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 224