Jack: Secret Histories

Young Repairman Jack Series 1

De: F. Paul Wilson

Narrado por: Alexander Cendese

Ever come across a situation that simply wasn't right - where someone was getting the dirty end of the stick and you wished you could make things right but didn't know how? Fourteen-year-old Jack knows how. Or rather he's learning how. He's discovering that he has a knack for fixing things. Not bikes or toys or appliances - situations...

It all starts when Jack and his best friends, Weezy and Eddie, discover a rotting corpse - the victim of ritual murder - in the fabled New Jersey Pine Barrens. Beside the body is an ancient artifact carved with strange designs. What is its secret? What is the secret of the corpse? What other mysteries hide in the dark, timeless Pine Barrens? And who doesn't want them revealed?

Jack's town, the surrounding Barrens, his friends, even Jack himself...they all have...Secret Histories.

©2008 F. Paul Wilson (P)2020 Tantor

Pre-Origin Story of Repairman Jack Sets Up Series

After reading some reviews and talking to some other Repairman Jack readers, I saw this one get offered in Audible Plus. It was a pleasant surprise and sets up Jack's special person of interest with the Otherness. You get to see a 1980's version of Jack with Weezie and her brother in the New Jersey Pine Barrens as they find a body and artifacts of the Otherness and the Secret History.

Some of the story is told like a Young Adult novel and I guess in some ways that is what it was to be. There are plenty of 1980's references to go with Jack's fix it nature. You even meet Abe's uncle who has hired Jack at his antique curiosities shop in town where he teaches Jack about lock picking. Even Kate and brother Tom are part of the story which sets up the love-hate relationship demonstrated between the brothers in "Infernals." The pistachio payback is one of the earliest of Repairman Jack's fix it jobs as an adolescent.

Unfortunately I thought the narrator Alexander Cendese tried way too hard to make it sound like an episode of Scooby Doo. No Zoinks! But you will know it when you hear his voices for Weezie's brother and Jack's friend Steve. The depiction of Jack's brother Tom's eating corn and speaking was a bit monotonous. It did take away from the story for me, but only a bit.

Great story and I look forward to finishing the trilogy.

Decent Juvenile

I haven't read any of the Repairman Jack series, so this is a de novo review.

The story is set in southern New Jersey, in the summer before the protagonist will enter High School as a freshman*. He and his two real friends are spending the summer working and wandering around in the pine barrens doing what kids did before electronic games and widespread use of computers.

They find a body and the circumstances of the death are very unusual, involving possibly supernatural elements.

The characters are well realized and believable for their ages. The world of small town rural New Jersey is drawn nicely, and reminds me of the towns I spent time in around the same era.

There are a couple of plots, a small one involving one of the MC's friends, that could have been more impactful, but that ends up being resolved easily, and a larger one that is only partly addressed in this book. The target audience for this books seems to be between that for middle grade fiction and much of the more mature YA fiction that is being published. (It fits into something like the same niche as the old Heinlein juveniles, in my opinion.)

As a set of character studies, this is pretty good, but the plot didn't really compel my attention. Overall, it's not bad, but that's about it's limit.

* I don't know how New Jersey schools were organized in 1983, but where I was, the model was still Jr. High School from grades 7-9 and High School from grades 10-12, but this book assumes High School will be grades 9-12.