Review: The Summer I Met Jack

The Summer I Met Jack by Michelle Gable
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

JFK had a well-known reputation for collecting the affections of women from all over the world and from every class. While many know about Judith Campbell and Marilyn Monroe, there were others that didn't necessarily rise to the same level of attention, including Alicia Corning Clark, also known by many other names, including Alicia Darr when she was a young woman working in Hyannisport in the 1950s.

This is a work of fiction, but the book does include a lot of details that were extracted from newspaper and magazine articles. The real story about Alicia Clark is mostly left to the twentieth century rumor mill, but this fictional fleshing out of her story is fascinating to read. Could there be a secret Kennedy love child out there somewhere? Because of what the general public knows about Kennedy, it could be possible, and if you imagined how that child would grow up, Gable's tale is one plausible story.

The one area where the book seems to take a turn is on the Kennedy family themselves. Though they paint them in the light that the public saw, the author made them a little more petty and vindictive than I would have imagined them to be, but still within the realm of possibility. The book even goes as far as proposing a possibility of the truth to Marilyn Monroe's death, though I won't spoil that for readers here. It's not easy to take real people and put them into situations where only the view of the periphery remains, but Gable seems to do it well.

*Book provided by NetGalley


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