Jake

Jake takes place during one of the single most powerfully shaping times in a person’s life—secondary education. Through the metaphor of the utopian and fictitious St. Stephen’s Episcopal School, author Arch Montgomery shows us how our humanity can only be fully realized through other humans. The book depicts three deaths and one near-fatal disease while simultaneously tracking the rebirth of Jake, the titular and main character. He moves from a transparent “only-good-as-I-have-to-be” mentality to a lifestyle of excellence and three-dimensionality with the help of his school, which is personified through the characters of Mary White, rector; George Meader, teacher; and Joel Kohn, student.

Jake presents both Montgomery’s view of public school systems (which Jake, without a drop of nostalgia, refers to as “out in the county”) and his view of an ideal school, which, in this case, comes in the form of an independent school, though the tenets that make it so admirable could be applied to almost any school—public, independent, parochial, or otherwise. Mixing real-world models with an informed idealism, Montgomery creates St. Stephen’s in order to demonstrate the most positive influence a school can have on one person.

On the flipside of that coin, however, remain numerous questions about what kind of negative effects sub-par schools can have on their students. While St. Stephen’s gives its students a three-dimensional education—mind (academics), body (athletics), and spirit (chapel and community service)—do public schools scratch the surface of even just one dimension? While Mary White, the head of St. Stephen’s, plays roles as varied as disciplinarian, spiritual leader, and friend, in what light do most public school students view their own principals? While the educational events of the highest consequence happen to Jake outside the classroom, how many public school students interact with their classmates, teachers, or administration beyond a school setting?

On a continuum of education quality—satisfactory, good, great, excellent, ideal—where does St. Stephen’s fall? Where does the school you went to, or your children go to, fall? These and many other questions arise in Jake, and beg to be discussed, because once problems are recognized, they can begin to get solved.

Arch Montgomery is the Headmaster of Asheville School in Asheville, North Carolina, where he lives with his wife, Phyllis, two sons, Greg and Tyler, and their aging beagle, Sherwood.

Before he settled on teaching in 1985, his career included a brief stab at practicing law in Baltimore, and four years in the United States Army, a part of which was spent learning to stay warm in Fairbanks, Alaska.

He is a graduate of the University of Texas School of Law, The Monterey (CA) Language School in Russian, the University of Pennsylvania, and Westminster School of Simsbury, Connecticut.

Before becoming Asheville School’s headmaster, he was the headmaster at The Gilman School in Baltimore, MD, and a teacher at St. George’s School in Newport, RI.

In addition to educational and aquatic pursuits (he is an enthusiastic and regular trout fisher), he is a regular columnist for the Asheville Citizen Times. Jake is the second novel in his Gunpowder Trilogy. The first, Hank, was published in 2003.