The Unthinkable Thoughts of Jacob Green

Occasionally when I find the writers I generally read do not have any new books out and the new release shelf does not have anything that catches my eye; I will peruse the general fiction shelves. I then sort of scan them until I see a spine that interests me and proceed to pick 4-6 books off that bookcase from writers that I have never heard of. Sometimes this pays off and I find a new writer and backlist that I can work through. A lot of the time I will make it 50 or so pages and give up. Then there is the third category, I read the book and it is okay but does not evoke any excitement in me.

The Unthinkable thoughts of Jacob Green by Joshua Braff is clearly in the third category. It visits a young man at three points in his life; 9, 13, and 15 years old. While mildly entertaining and providing a pretty good portrait of what a bad father can do, overall I am at a loss to understand what the writer was trying to say. This is another book that could have been a lot longer, but instead it leaves a lot for the reader to imagine. Unfortunately as a reader I just didn’t care enough about the characters to ponder it.

In short, Jacob thinks his father is crap in that narcissistic religious fundamentalist way (in this case Jewish), and that girls are hot and he wants to have sex with them (but as a teenage boy myself once, I already knew that – it is kind of universal). The one thing I did learned was how to understand the joke about a pastrami sandwich from Annie Hall from a Jewish perspective. In the same venue (books about teenagers written more for adults), a recall enjoying King Dork by Frank Portman more. As a bonus, if you get it as a recorded book you can hear my old college roommate Lincoln Hoppe doing the voice work.