Jake's Journey

An Amazon reader review for Man with No Yesterdays begins by calling the book “a fascinating read,” then elaborates on the premise: a man who suffers from total retrograde amnesia, recalling only bits and pieces of his early childhood, who comes to believe he will never remember more.

Could it happen? Theoretically, it could. Traumatic brain injury can leave the victim with little or nothing in the way of personal memory, as well as loss of the ability to speak, move, reason. Best case scenario, the patient slowly recovers most if not all of his life and returns to a normal, or very nearly normal, life.

Jake Cameron, my character introduced in Memories of Jake whose story is told in considerably more detail in Man with No Yesterdays, suffers a T.B.I. due to a helicopter crash in Vietnam. Jake quickly regains his ability to function in the world, but nearly all of his personal history has apparently been locked away for the remainder of his life. He doesn’t remember anything about his years as a Green Beret in Vietnam, even after meeting men he served with.

How would a man react to this truly awful dilemma? Jake first tries to regain his memory, spending time at home with his family, looking at photos, listening to their memories of him. And he does have moments of recall from childhood, a few very vivid; but most are snapshots, faded and foggy. As weeks and months pass and very little more is revealed to him, he begins to face the possibility he may never remember the man he was … the warrior he was. So who is he now? 

Throughout the book I strove to reflect on the daunting difficulties our warriors faced in Vietnam, both in country and after returning home. As a novelist, my aim in writing the novel was to address a “what if” situation: what if a young man who had fought valiantly in Vietnam lost all memory of himself and even began to wonder why he had become a warrior? What then? How would he move forward to create some kind of life for himself? And for Jake, this is complicated further when he vividly recalls one childhood memory that rocks him to his core.

I appreciate that this reviewer called the book “a fascinating read.” My hope is that a reader will come away with that sense. It was not an easy book to write, and I challenged myself even further by allowing Jake to speak for himself … writing in the first person. My pre-publication “beta” readers were enthusiastic about the novel. Time will tell whether all readers will share that enthusiasm!

If you are intrigued, the link to order the book on Amazon is included below, and it’s available in paperback and as a Kindle. If you read and enjoy … I would love to hear from you (my email address is on my website), and reviews are music to us indie authors’ ears!

Portrait by Ashleigh Evans

Cover Design by Tristan Flanagan

website: www.susanmoorejordan.com

Link to Amazon book page: https://www.amazon.com/Man-Yesterdays-Susan-Moore-Jordan/dp/1977701809/