Book Review for Jackie by Dawn Tripp

 Jackie by Dawn Tripp

Published June 18, 2024 by Random House

Genre:  Historical Fiction

 

Taken from Goodreads:  In this mesmerizing novel about Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, acclaimed author Dawn Tripp has crafted an intimate story of love and power, family and tragedy, loss and reinvention.

The world has divided my life into three:

Life with Jack
Life with Onassis
Life as a woman who goes to work because she wants to.

My life is all of these things, and it is none of these things. They continue to miss what’s right in front of them. I love books. I love the sea. I love horses. Children. Art. Ideas. History. Beauty. Because beauty blows us open to wonder.
Even the beauty that breaks your heart.

Jackie is the story of a woman—deeply private with a nuanced, formidable intellect—who forged a legacy out of grief and shaped history even as she was living it. It is the story of a love affair, a complicated marriage, and the fracturing of identity that comes in the wake of unthinkable violence.

When Jackie meets the charismatic congressman Jack Kennedy in Georgetown, she is twenty-one and dreaming of France. She has won an internship at Vogue. Kennedy, she thinks, is not her kind of adventure: “Too American. Too good-looking. Too boy.” Yet she is drawn to his mind, his humor, his drive. The chemistry between them ignites. During the White House years, the love between two independent people deepens. Then, a motorcade in Dallas: “Three and a half seconds—that’s all it was—a slivered instant between the first shot, which missed the car, and the second, which did not. . . . A hypnotic burst of sunlight off her bracelet as she waved.”

This vivid, exquisitely written novel is at once a captivating work of the imagination and a window into the world of a woman who led many lives: Jackie, Jacks, Jacqueline, Miss Bouvier, Mrs. Kennedy, Jackie O.

 

My Thoughts:  Jackie Kennedy is a historical person that has always intrigued me.  I love to hear her accounts of the life she lived.   I always thought the life she lived was charmed but the more I read the more I realize how much she was put through to get through the life she was living. 

I liked that while I was reading a historical fiction book, Dawn Tripp (the author) stayed very true to history.   I enjoyed reading another perspective of the Kennedy legacy.  It is amazing to me how much I am able to retain from reading a good historical fiction book vs. how little I retained while taking history courses in school.  

Jackie is a great historical fiction book.   There were a few times that I felt I was reading non-fiction and it got a little dull.    I felt some of the paragraphs were repetitive or out of sequence but maybe that is because I have read or listened to so many Jackie/Jack Kennedy books that I am so familiar with their lives.   

Over all, this is a great historical fiction book.   If you are a fan of the Kennedy’s I recommend picking up your own copy.

Thank you Random House for a copy of the book via NetGalley in exchange for you my honest review.

 

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Meet Dawn Trip (taken from her website):  Dawn Tripp is the author of the novel Georgia, which was a national bestseller, finalist for the New England Book Award, and winner of the Mary Lynn Kotz Award for Art in Literature. She is the author of three previous novels: Game of Secrets, Moon Tide, and The Season of Open Water, which won the Massachusetts Book Award for Fiction. Her poems and essays have appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Harvard Review, AGNI, Conjunctions, and NPR, among others. She serves on the board of the Boston Book Festival and on the board of Gnome Surf: A non-profit Surf Therapy Organization focused on creating a culture shift towards kindness, love, and acceptance for athletes of all abilities. She graduated from Harvard and lives in Massachusetts with her sons.