In her writings and conversations about her work, Katherine Paterson repeatedly raises issues which emerge as artistic challenges for her. Among these are her commitment to the young reader's right to an absorbing story and her difficulties with plotting. Herself imbued with the Christian spirit, all Paterson's stories—whether they are set in feudal Japan or World War II Chesapeake Bay—dramatize a young protagonist's encounter with the mysteries of grace and love. Her published work reveals that many of Paterson's problems with plot may derive from the challenge of discovering and sequencing a series of episodes that will present honestly and nondidactically a theme that has no sequence in it…. A plot, as C. S. Lewis says, "is only really a net whereby to catch something else." For Paterson in her latest novel, Jacob Have I Loved, that something else is the experience of swift and sudden release from hatred and vengefulness through the acceptance of and cooperation with selfless love. (p. 180)
Typically Patersonian, Jacob Have I Loved is a tighly woven novel; each character, each episode, each speech, each image helps to incarnate that which the author is imagining. The net which catches and binds together the whole is her adroit manipulation of several levels of story: the story which the adolescent Sarah Louise ("Wheeze") Bradshaw tells of and to herself in her attempt to comprehend the meaning of the life she is daily living; the story that the young mother and midwife Sarah Louise tells through the configuration of characters and events she selects from her memory of her tumultuous teen years rounded by the insights and incidents she adds from a maturer perspective; and the Bible stories of Jacob and Esau in the Old Testament and the birth of Christ in the New, which provides an allusive frame for the other two story levels, and which add resonance to, universalize, Louise's personal experience.
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