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Jeanne: A journey from abandonment and abuse to forgiveness and truth.

Sylvia Hornback

3.67 · Rating details · 3 ratings · 4 reviews

The latest novel by award winning author of the Mallard Conspiracy, Sylvia Hornback.

SYNOPSIS:

At dawn on a sweltering summer day

scrabbling sounds alerted Jeanne of the intruder downstairs.

The pull chain rattled against the light bulb in the kitchen.

Instantly a sliver of yellow light raced up

the stairs and into her bedroom.

Someone was moving about inside the house,

and ha ...more

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Hardcover, 342 pages

Published November 15th 2019 by Briggs & Schuster

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Dec 02, 2019 Nathan Albright rated it really liked it

Shelves: challenge-2019

[Note: This book was provided free of charge by Adams PR Group. All thoughts and opinions are my own.]

There are many different kinds of fiction that one finds. Some fiction is clearly genre fiction, working within or subverting various conventions. Some fiction is literary fiction, with a high degree of intellectual value on top of its plot and allusions. This book is, properly speaking, neither of those things. It is a sort of fiction that I would consider as quotidian fiction, a fictionali [Note: This book was provided free of charge by Adams PR Group. All thoughts and opinions are my own.]

There are many different kinds of fiction that one finds. Some fiction is clearly genre fiction, working within or subverting various conventions. Some fiction is literary fiction, with a high degree of intellectual value on top of its plot and allusions. This book is, properly speaking, neither of those things. It is a sort of fiction that I would consider as quotidian fiction, a fictionalized memoir of an abused girl that lingers long on the annals of poor and dysfunctional families, in this case during the Great Depression and World War II. For those of us familiar with the writing or the experience of dysfunctional families, this novel provides nothing that is particularly unfamiliar. There are dark family secrets, there is physical and verbal abuse, there are people who struggle to overcome generational patterns of failure, there are nasty and catty people who look down on the protagonist because of their poverty and experience of dysfunction. And so on it goes. All of this makes this book relatable for a certain audience but it does not make it an enjoyable read. Indeed, this sort of novel revels in being as unenjoyable as possible, or else it would aspire to be a literature about hopes and dreams rather than about how to deal with the soul-sucking reality of abandonment and abuse.

This book is about 300 pages long and it covers several years in the life of the titular young heroine Jeanne. She and her brother Eli, along with her handicapped brother Robby, are abandoned first by their father and then by their mother and are unable to make a go of it and so they move in with their grandparents. Life as a tenant farmer is tough and eventually the grandfather gets injured and the family has to move back to town in considerable poverty. Jeanne tries to uncover family secrets, dealing with her abusive and occasionally returning mother and her distant and rather dilatory correspondent of a father, who rather conveniently dies overseas in the Pacific front. Jeanne's friendship with Daniel leads her to investigate the story of her lost brother who was given up for adoption (spoiler alert, she finds him at the end), and the book ends with Jeanne as a young adult, grown up and struggling to come to terms with her family past as well as the potential of a good future that results from her work ethic, skills at reporting and investigating, and her educational attainments.

Beyond the subject matter of the book, though, there are some aspects of this book that are particularly uncomfortable and that strain the credulity of the reader. It seems immensely unlikely that a young woman would be smart enough to be a clerk as well as a reporter during her teenage years and be valedictorian of her high school class and not know when her eighteenth birthday was and be counting the days to it nearly continually. That is one of the unbelievable aspects of this book's plot, which is all the more striking when one considers just how much this novel aches and yearns to be realistic through its numbing detail of small town and rural life among poor but proud Texans. And the novel has at least one massively cringeworthy aspect to it in the titular character's uneasy and at least potentially incestuous romance with an injured young man who may be her brother who is jealous of her relationship with a playboy who gets another girl pregnant and then accuses her unfairly of being a whore. This novel certainly does not shy away from unpleasant subject material. Whether that is for the best is not always clear. ...more

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Nov 15, 2020 Cassandra rated it liked it

Shelves: read-my-own-library, christian-fiction, historical-fiction

So I'm reading along, all engrossed in the story, eagerly waiting to find out how things are going to wrap up when... it just ends. Most of the loose ends are tied up but the ending was completely unsatisfactory. I felt like the author had a word limit and suddenly realized she only had 1,000 words left. "Ok, how can we end this? Um. Let's just stop it right here."

The author's strength is her character development. Jeanne is extremely real. She has strengths, weaknesses, struggles to make the r ...more

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Jan 31, 2020 Sharon rated it really liked it

Sylvia Hornback’s rich historical coming of age novel is filled with love, strife, heartache and hope.

Jeanne is a young girl struggling to survive in a time of turmoil and constant change. She is working on her grandparents farm, taking care of her younger brother with a mental disability, finishing school, and desperately trying to make peace with an absent mother and father. On top of that, she corresponds with her older brother and his friend Daniel who have joined the war. Jeanne is a wonde ...more

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Dec 09, 2019 Ani G added it

Join Us for this Tour from Dec 2 to Dec 20, 2019!
Book Title: Jeanne: A Journey from abandonment and abuse to forgiveness and truth by Sylvia Hornback
Category: Adult Fiction
Genre: Historical Fiction
Publisher: Briggs and Schuster
Release date: November 1, 2019
Tour dates: December 2 to December 20, 2019
Content Rating: PG – There are less than five cuss words plus adult themes of parental neglect.

BOOK DESCRIPTION:
Don’t miss the latest novel by award winning author of The Mallard Conspiracy!
“A well ...more

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