What I Knew About Clare

This is a most unconventional love story between Jimmie Owens, a Baptist boy living in the small southern town of Fauberg, and young Clare Banning, a quantum physics prodigy and socialite heiress. Through their hours and days together on the Banning estate in Fauberg and later in her family's New York City home, Jimmy's intellect is awakened as he is swept up into Clare's world. Though the youngsters' mothers are close friends, Jimmy's father fears Clare's magnetic pull on his son. Conflicted by a deep love for his parents, a desire for popularity among his peers, and the challenges of Clare's liberal Episcopalian ways, Jimmy drifts apart from Clare. Only at the end does Jimmy finally understand what he had come to know about Clare.

Review :
"Each page spins around us a chrysalis of mystery encasing the secret thoughts, feelings, passions of our love and life. Terence Aditon's story of Clare and Jimmy, is our story as well, enabling us to see the transforming power of love and self awareness going on within the chrysalis of our hearts. It is a story of enlightenment through our pain, understanding through our perceptions and the happiness that comes in discovering the "surprises of love" in the deeper places of its wisdom as well as its passions. Love indeed changes everything in its metamorphosis journey. It changes "the intellect, the boy, the leading student, the star player" until the birth of his new self emerges. To glance at a chrysalis, one might think that nothing is happening within. Aditon takes us through the "maquis" of love - a French term of a "tangle of greenary, with dense undergrowth that would discourage the climber and hiker because it looks impenetrable. The word gives us a name that becomes our symbols." And thus, love carries us into the "maquis" the dense, rich, thick undergrowth where love is really rooted. Where wisdom nurtures the mind, body and spirit, until we recognizing its essence to transform and shape us. Until, upon the wiggled finger waved in the air, the butterfly comes to find the nectar that love produces by those who permit their hearts to be penetrated by love's "ravishing" gift to change us. Clare told Jimmy that "once he heard about something, that he'd want to know it." And he did. He wanted to know about love. As you read What I Knew About Clare, you will come to know something deeper about love. You will penetrate the "maquis" of love's gifts. You will feel the way a slight movement of air from a butterfly's wing, can change all of history. "What wing moved, I wonder, to bring me that extraordinary moment when love changes you, frees you and transforms the shape of what you have become because of love?" Read this book. You will feel the wisp of those wings." -- The Rev. Ronald W. Cadmus, author, Still, In One Peace; God's Loving Embrace and Fragile Ornaments; Melting Snowflakes and the Healing Light of Christmas.