Review of Jimmy’s Girl

by Stephanie Gertler

Reviewed by Jennifer West

 

Emily Hudson seems to have a full, enviable life.  A stay-at-home mother to four healthy happy children, and married to a lawyer, she is able to spend her days painting in her own studio.  But Emily and her workaholic husband have grown apart, her nearly-grown children do not seem to need her as they once did, and Emily finds her thoughts and feelings drawn back to her teenage years when she was known as “Jimmy’s girl” the protected girl friend and confidant of the handsome Jimmy Moran, her high school sweetheart.

 

It was the summer of 1967, and Emily and Jimmy were passionately in love.  Emily’s mother and friends have warned her about Jimmy, that he drinks and is a failure in school, but Emily doesn’t care.  She loves him.  Jimmy does drink as a response to his distant mother and alcoholic father, and has undiagnosed dyslexia.  Emily is the only bright spot in his life and he realizes he is a better person when she is around.

 

Then the powers that be decide Jimmy will go into the Marine Corps. Emily and her mother see him off as he leaves for boot camp.  When Jimmy returns home on leave before being shipped out to Vietnam, Emily does not recognize him physically or emotionally, so much has the military changed him.  This meeting is all Jimmy could think about while he was gone and when Emily, scared and bewildered, blurts out that she has found someone else, Jimmy walks away from her, an action he is to replay over and over in his mind.

 

Thirty years later Emily tries to locate Jimmy by searching the Internet.  Jimmy is now married and working part-time in a dead-end job and caring for his adopted daughter.  After talking on the telephone, they plan to meet in Washington D.C. to visit the Vietnam War monument together.  Emily tells her husband she is only researching a new series of paintings.  Jimmy isn’t sure what to tell his wife who watches him seemingly go through another physical and emotional transformation.

 

Emily and Jimmy spend a weekend together and realize their love for each other still lives.  But perhaps time is too great a barrier or perhaps neither Emily or Jimmy can really leave their spouses or their children.  And so they grow apart again.

 

The story is told by both characters in alternating chapters and it is fascinating to read both characters views of the same incidents.  The complicated Jimmy is the more interesting of the two narrators as he describes the darkness that surrounds him.  By contrast Emily is a flat, undeveloped character and her motives are difficult to understand.  Is she truly interested in the middle-aged Jimmy as he is now, or is she merely bored with her present life, and as Jimmy fears, only using him? I found it a sad story really.  Jimmy deserved more from life, and much more from Emily.

 

Stephanie Gertler is a freelance journalist who has been writing all her life.  She lives with her husband and their children in Scarsdale, New York.  Jimmy’s Girl is her first novel.

 

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