A family named Bouvier

A Family Named Bouvier
Riley Buchanan
A Woman Named Jackie
by C.David Heymann
          The first 5 chapters of this book could absolutely be enough to turn you away if you aren't already familiar with and interested in Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. This entire chunk of the book focuses more on her parents and grandparents and all their wealth, prestige, and success than it does on Jackie.
          To give you the quick rundown, Jackies mother and father both came from extremely wealthy families, her father's family had old-money and her mother’s parents had new-money. They met from both being high-society in New York City and Jackie’s father especially being an older and quite promiscuous socialite. Her parents had a rocky marriage because of her father's cheating, which her mother more or else allowed for years because “she had too much pride. Yet she didn't have enough pride to ditch her husband”(35),(foreshadowing?).  They finally divorced when Jackie was 11, which obviously took a toll on her, considering she now had to travel from one jealous parent to another. All of Jackie’s paternal aunts, uncles, and grandparents also had viscous divorces that negatively affected her (foreshadowing again?) and “played a role in the chopping down of the family tree”(46). Then we learn that her mother married an insanely rich man older than herself (for the second time), (foreshadowing again?) who was “a big, toddling teddy-bear of a man with smiling eyes and a pleasant disposition”(51).
          I'm someone who already knew and loved a lot about Jackie, which is why I chose this book, so learning about her family dynamics growing up gives me interesting insight into her character/personality as a woman. On the other hand, for someone who hasn't studied her before, they can't make the connections from childhood to adulthood or see her personality development, so this part of the book is going to be quite boring.
          I’m sure that the parts of this book focusing on her life during her husband John F. Kennedy’s campaign, presidency, and assassination will be as fascinating as you'd imagine but for the time being, I haven't gotten to that part of the book yet. I’ll update my review in the future when I've read at least more of- if not the entire- biography, and hopefully it will be a little bit better.
          At this point in the text, I’d suggest that only people who've studied Jackie, want to study her more, and favor biographies read this book. Not only is there a big chunk of background information that isn't super fun to read, but the book is also basically just a fact-provider. It doesn’t involve a lot of pictures or quotes or interviews and that's quite possibly due to the fact that it's, at this point, only about her life in the 1930’s and early 1940’s. Most of the people she was close to at that time are probably dead, but that doesn't change the fact that a lack of those more intimate details in a biography make it a tad boring. For these reasons, I again only recommend this book to those of you that are fans of biographies and believe you know enough about Jackie’s adult life that you would find her upbringing interesting.