December 15, 2022
An award-winning novelist recounts his sickly boyhood and other difficult early-life circumstances. As a child, Johnston was beset by chronic illness: a persistent cough, insomnia, and a digestive problem so severe that he couldn't keep food down--ailments that were exacerbated by his living conditions. He and his family moved 23 times by the time he was 7, running away when they couldn't pay the rent. "We boys never knew when we were leaving or exactly where we were moving next," he recalls, "just that we were always one car breakdown or appliance repair away from having an eviction notice slipped beneath our door in the middle of the night." The author focuses on one precarious year when the family lived in an "old, small, rundown, drafty," leaky house in the small town of Goulds, Newfoundland, where their mother had grown up and where her parents lived across the street. Although Johnston's father was an inspector for the fisheries department, he frittered away his salary on drink. His mother, Jennie, felt mortified that her weak and skinny son seemed evidence of bad mothering. Too sick to go to school, he was cared for by his grandmother Lucy, a woman steeped in "ignorance and superstition, magic, black magic, ghosts and Holy Ghosts and archangels the size of galaxies, wart- and cancer-curing Holy Water, all mixed up with fairies and witches and sprites and goblins." Still, Lucy offered her grandson love and reassurance: "You were put on earth for a reason, although it wouldn't surprise me if God himself can't remember what it is." Jennie and Lucy believed in the power of prayer, not medicine: Only after the author collapsed with a life-threatening fever did Jennie, reluctantly, take him to a doctor. That visit set him on a path to one specialist after another, all of whom came up with diagnoses--a heart murmur, pleurisy--and prescribed pills that the family couldn't afford. Johnston recounts his childhood with affection and humor. Happily, and somewhat miraculously, he grew up to be a healthy adult. A tender memoir.
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Starred review from January 1, 2023
By the time he was seven, Wayne had lived in 23 houses, thanks to his father's propensity for drinking the rent. Finally, the family moves to a glorified shack in Goulds, Newfoundland, population 300, across the road from Wayne's maternal grandparents, Ned and Lucy. Often unable to go to school because of his many maladies--a heart murmur, pleurisy, a chronic cough, and insomnia--Wayne spends his days with his much-loved grandmother, drinking chocolate Quik and praying at the shrine to the Virgin that Lucy keeps in her bedroom. Well, Lucy prays, Wayne pretends. Aside from his grandparents, Wayne's family consists of his often-inebriated father Art, his mother (the eponymous Jennie), who has a pathological fear of what the neighbors will think, and the four boys: Ken, Craig, the author, and baby brother Brian. Of the three siblings, bold Craig is the star, often ripping into Wayne (""You spoil everything!"") and then, repenting his anger, tousling Wayne's hair and hugging him so tightly the boy can hardly breathe. Johnston's affectionate memoir of a year in his young life is a diverting survival story (both his own and his family's) that proves the quotidian can be compelling. Beautifully written (""Lucy's eyes were as dark as burnt raisins""), Jennie's Boy is an excellent example of narrative nonfiction that captures the reader's attention and doesn't let go until the book's apposite ending.
COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.