First Semester Reading Project In the book Letters to Jennifer by James Pattersons, there is an important lesson that Grandma Sam teaches to Jennifer. While Jennifer remembers the summers she spent at her grandmother’s house and all the important lessons Sam has taught her, Jennifer remembers the time she was about to leave and her grandmother gave her a jar to fill up with seashells and sand. Jennifer kept coming back and Grandma Sam kept sending her back outside saying the jar wasn’t full. Finally Sam told her to fit the large shells and rocks in first, then fill it with sand and smaller shells that would fall into the cracks. Sam told Jennifer, “that living life was like putting the beach into a jar. The point wasn’t to fit everything in; it was to attend to the most important things first- the big, beautiful rocks- the most valuable people and experiences- and fit the lesser things in around them” (Patterson 88). This really stuck with Jennifer throughout her life. When something important came her way she shoved the little unimportant things, like the newspaper, out of the way and focused on the big things, Sam and Brendan. Jennifer is a writer that writes three columns every week for a newspaper based out of Chicago. Everything is going smoothly in Jennifer’s life until one day she receives a call from a friend of her grandmother saying that her grandmother has been admitted to the hospital and is in a coma after tripping and falling. Jennifer packs her bags and rushes down to Lake Geneva to visit her grandmother.
After returning to her grandmothers house for the night, she finds a bundle of letter addressed to her held together with a piece of old yarn. As she opens the first one she reads that the letters tell the real story of her grandma, Sam, and all her true feelings and secrets. Sam writes that she only wants Jennifer to read a couple of letters at a time. Jennifer was shocked, because she was always close with her Sam after spending the summers down there growing up.
After a couple of days of visiting Sam in the hospital with no changes in her recovery she comes home one afternoon to a man standing on the porch. After introducing themselves Jennifer finds out that he is a friend from her childhood, Brenden. Although at first Jennifer rejected the company of Brendan, the two of them started spending a lot of time together. Throughout Sam’s coma when Jennifer would visit the hospital she would tell her what she was thinking about Brendan or what she had recently read in the letters. She tried to keep up with the demanding work of the newspaper, but she had to reduce her role and just write one article a week, which was still challenging.
In the letters Jennifer learned about Sam’s true relationship with her husband, Charles. The two of them were never loyal to each other. Charles would always sneak off to the city and have an affair, while Sam had a mystery man by the fake name of “Doc”. Sam and Charles stayed together for the benefit of their children and grandchildren.
Over time Brendan and Jennifer open up to each other. Jennifer shares about the sensitive subject of her husbands death and the miscarriage of their baby. Brendan shares the fact that he has brain cancer and the only option would be experimental surgery that could possibly kill Brendan or leave him paralyzed. It was important to him to spend one last summer at his uncles beach house