Jackie & Me
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
This "absolutely irresistible" historical romance imagines the courtship between Jacqueline Bouvier and the future American president she loved (People).
In 1951, former debutante Jacqueline Bouvier is hard at work as the Inquiring Camera Girl for a Washington newspaper. Her mission in life is “not to be a housewife,” but when she meets the charismatic congressman Jack Kennedy at a Georgetown party, her resolution begins to falter. Soon the two are flirting over secret phone calls, cocktails, and dinner dates, and as Jackie is drawn deeper into the Kennedy orbit, and as Jack himself grows increasingly elusive and absent, she begins to question what life at his side would mean. For answers, she turns to his best friend and confidant, Lem Billings, a closeted gay man who has made the Kennedy family his own, and who has been instructed by them to seal the deal with Jack’s new girl. But as he gets to know her, a deep and touching friendship emerges, leaving him with painfully divided alliances and a troubling dilemma: Is this the marriage she deserves?
Narrated by an older Lem as he looks back at his own role in a complicated alliance, this is a courtship story full of longing and of suspense, of what-ifs and possible wrong turns. It is a surprising look at Jackie before she was that Jackie. And in best-selling author Louis Bayard’s witty and deeply empathetic telling, Jackie & Me is a page-turning story of friendship, love, sacrifice, and betrayal— and a fresh take on two iconic American figures.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bayard (Courting Mr. Lincoln) offers an enchanting narrative of John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Bouvier in which their marriage might not happen after all. The story is told from the perspective of Jack's best friend, Lem Billings, who recounts the couple's surreptitious dating in 1952 followed by their engagement and Jackie's hesitancy to go through with the nuptials. Despite embodying "a creature bending both toward and away from matrimony," Jackie is groomed to become a future Kennedy and to fall in line with both Jack's political aspirations and his womanizing. Looking back from the early 1980s, Lem is regretful over not warning Jackie as much as he could about the darkness behind the Kennedy family's legacy, as well as his inability to come to terms with his sexual identity due to concerns about Jack's reputation. Things can also be delightfully dishy, as in a description of Bobby Kennedy's wife, Ethel, as being "combative as a Cape buffalo, not above swiping an older sister's boyfriend... and then, having smuggled her way into the compound, quicker than anyone to bar the gate." Bayard suffuses the spritzy story with wit, charm, and depth. The result is tailor-made for fans of Camelot drama.
