Review of Daddy Jack’s Place by Priscilla B. Shuler
Daddy Jack's Place
- Priscilla B. Shuler
- Fiction
- Historical, Drama, Psychological
- 30-Oct-2015
There are books that roar, and then there are books that rumble—a subterranean tremor beneath the skin. Daddy Jack’s Place is one of the latter. It doesn’t yell for attention. It waits. And if you’re still enough, and open enough, it might just catch you off guard—not with bombast, but with the whisper of hard-earned truth.
Priscilla B. Shuler has written a novel that feels like a walk through a cemetery where every tombstone tells a story you thought you'd forgotten. At its center is Jack Boussereau, a man whose life doesn’t just take a wrong turn—it gets quietly rerouted by a revelation that collapses his moral and spiritual compass. There’s no fanfare to this collapse. There’s no explosion. Only a slow, quiet internal implosion that echoes for decades.
What makes this novel unique is its willingness to dwell in discomfort—not the grotesque or graphic kind, but the emotional residue of a lifetime lived under the weight of things unspoken. Jack doesn’t set out to redeem himself in dramatic fashion. He doesn’t rally the town, conquer enemies, or become the prodigal son returned in glory. Instead, he opens a small store in a place most people couldn’t find on a map. And somehow, that act—so minor in a narrative sense—becomes monumental in a human one.
The power of Daddy Jack’s Place lies in its restraint. In a literary culture where resolution is often required, this novel gives us reflection. In a world hungry for transformation arcs, this book offers the honesty of inertia. Jack doesn’t reinvent himself. He simply tries, haltingly and without much faith in himself, to exist without pretending. That’s rarer than it sounds.
The setting is richly textured, not with over-description but with atmosphere: the creak of a screen door, the buzz of gossip in a humid town, the dry honesty of conversations that don’t always end with clarity. The store itself becomes more than a location—it’s a metaphorical hearth, a place where people bring their everyday needs and unknowingly offer Jack pieces of his lost humanity.
One of the most affecting choices Shuler makes is the inclusion of children in Jack’s life—not as symbols, but as subtle counterpoints to his quiet decay. The presence of a boy who watches, learns, and trusts Jack is both a narrative balm and a silent challenge. In their interactions, we see the chance—not for salvation, perhaps—but for something less cinematic and more enduring: usefulness.
The novel also works as an accidental commentary on how communities metabolize grief, gossip, and grace. There’s no utopia here, but there is gentleness. A kind of moral weather system drifts through the chapters, where everyone is flawed, everyone is trying, and everyone is haunted by something. The town does not demand Jack’s confessions, but it gives him—almost unknowingly—the space to find footing.
For readers who crave explosive action or linear development, this won’t scratch the itch. But for those who’ve ever looked back on their life and wondered when exactly things veered off course—and whether it’s still possible to make peace with that moment—this story may hit closer to the heart than expected.
In the end, Daddy Jack’s Place isn’t about overcoming the past. It’s about living alongside it, letting it ride in the passenger seat without handing it the keys. It’s about choosing presence over escape, even when presence feels like penance. And that choice, quiet though it may be, carries a gravity few novels dare to hold.
Born at the height of the Great Depression, August 1932, Priscilla was the 3rd of 3 children. Growing up with only one sibling-Forest. Her older sister, Victoria, was taken by a great aunt to live in Florida. Priscilla lived through a very traumatic, restrictive childhood by a domineering, bipolar father. Her mother was a silent advocate in an attempt to keep calmer waters in which the family swam. Priscilla was born with extraordinary talents never allowed to surface until years later. Her only freedoms were realized within the school room. She excelled in every subject until Highschool where she encountered a teacher exemplifying her father's traits. She almost failed history-one of her favorite subjects. Fleeing home at 18, she met handsome Clemson ROTC Cadet in his Junior year. They married and immediately after graduation 'they' entered the military. For 25 years the family of six embraced their educations throughout the world. Priscilla took every advantage to study all possible cultures, arts, languages, lifestyles, peoples. Rejecting some, embracing others, she honed her desires to 'enlarge her coasts' as it were. After retirement, she decided there was now time enough to write. She began with a little short story and went on from there with six full length books. All are fiction, but bring snippets of her life as well as those of family and friends to be ingested by the readers of her fictions. At 89, she's now beginning her initial memoir.
