Louise, the protagonist of Jacob Have I Loved by Katherine Patterson, infuriates me. He fights against the ghosts of what he would like to be and what he really is, kicking and screaming all the way. I don't dispute that she has good reasons to struggle: certainly the neglect on the part of her family, perceived or real, and the expectations that her culture (I really mean environment here) has placed on her gender role have contributed to her difficult situation. – but his great inner strength and intuition belie his inability to overcome or at least work around those obstacles. To me she is a rebel with the sole cause of declaring her independence from the expected gender role. And, in this, I find myself, a young man with no commonality with my own gender parent, knowing that I am strong in not being, and yet fretting loudly but vacuously against this fact as if it were not good enough. I don't like Louise because she is a feminine reflection of me, whose wounds are mine. Early in the novel, the roots of Louise's problems are easy to trace to her resentment of her sister and the attention she demanded, resulting in my initial disdain for her as, to use colloquial language, a crybaby. In fact, I didn't identify with this at all other than my experience with younger siblings (I'm the oldest) who complained in much the same way as me. This certainly made it easy for me to create an objective distance from Louise and, in fact, allowed me to tolerate listening to her as I couldn't see anything in her like I did - she wasn't a threat and even though I didn't know it like her, it was more a question of taste than sensitivity. This changed dramatically when she suggested that the school's Christmas pageant be reconsidered in light of the war and was met with indifference by her teacher, Mr Rice. Her reaction to his rejection (at least to her) cut me to the bone:…but the hot shame and indignation inside me made me forget the wind as I walked. I was right. I knew I was right, so why was everyone laughing? And why had Mr. Rice let him? He hadn't even tried to explain what I meant to others... (31) First, the power of this quote overwhelms me with the exact same pain I've always felt when I was rejected by my peers and/or abandoned by a trusted adult ( whose gender and role also have meaning, as I will show shortly) in the face of that rejection.