Josie And Jack is one of those rare tales that seduces the reader from the first page. You find yourself slowly drawn into the relationship between sixteen year old Josie and her older, protectively scheming brother Jack. The sensual tightrope they share transcends brother and sister and is amply strengthened by the fact that they are left alone together most of the week by their brutal, absentee father, Raeburn. Raeburn is an aging college professor with a disdain for newer, slicker forms of education but that doesn’t stop him from using that old time knowledge as a mallet on his son and daughter. But he only uses it because he can. Because that’s his way of being their father, of filling a huge void that neither Josie nor Jack want filled. They are better off alone together and use every moment to their advantage. When Raeburn cooks up a plan to sexually implicate his teaching rival with a co-ed’s false complaint, Jack foils the scheme which results in Josie being left alone while her brother flees for several months. Raeburn is an emotional savage who delights in force feeding the “relevant facts of the world” to Josie. She can explain relativity but has trouble ordering a cheeseburger, or talking about the weather.

Jack spends a couple months on the road but eventually returns to liberate his sister. He also liberates a few valuable household furnishings that can be easily fenced. Josie isn’t very thrilled that her beloved Jack has lived the last few months in the arms of various women. She’s even less ecstatic to share a roof with Jack’s current flame, Becka, a stripper he met in a tattoo parlor.

Jack and Becka don’t last very long, mostly because Jack is sensually bound to Josie. They find themselves back on the road, ending up in Manhattan where they meet Lily while trying to con a cashier. Lily is wealthy and thinks nothing of taking Jack and Josie into her incredibly well appointed apartment. Lily and Jack become lovers. Josie waits for him in her own bed after Lily leaves to go about her day. Jack thinks nothing of sexually balancing Lily and Josie, almost like Josie is the climax to whatever he begins with Lily.

Lily easily suspects Jack and Josie and, at first, really doesn’t care very much. Her resentment for Josie grows slowly but viciously. What Lily doesn’t realize, what none of her friends that encounter Jack and Josie grasp is the depth of their fire against the rest of society. A furnace stoked over the years by Raeburn who led them into the no man’s land of intellectual superiority. Both Jack and Josie truly believe they are superior to everyone they encounter. But they wield their cutting edge emotions very differently. Jack brewing violence. Josie painting herself into a corner of illogical logic based upon her feelings for Jack. And it’s this confrontation that brings this novel to a shattering end.

I’m very much reminded of Meyer Levin’s novel Compulsion, based on the 1924 Loeb - Leopold case where a pair of upper class college students felt they were intellectually superior enough to commit the perfect murder. Author Kelly Braffet’s slow, careful unwinding of the character and personalities of Josie and Jack gives us a more modern peek into the minds of two “intellectually superior” children playing at life until someone bleeds. Oddly, no matter how superior they feel, they need one another to survive. Ms. Braffet’s novel is not only thriller paced; she provides the depth, through Josie’s eyes, to bring the reader to the window ledge of Josie’s decision. A precipice where she can’t step backward into the fire or forward into the abyss.

Josie And Jack is a must read.