Quick Take
- Narration: Bahni Turpin’s performance is exceptional, carrying the grief and love without ever tipping into sentimentality, one of the finest narrations in recent military memoir audio.
- Themes: War’s human cost, love and loss, a father’s legacy for a son he would never know
- Mood: Heartrending and tender, with rare moments of quiet joy
- Verdict: One of the most affecting antiwar documents in recent American memoir, written not in anger but in love.
There’s a section of A Journal for Jordan that I knew was coming, because the book’s premise announces it on the first page, and I still wasn’t ready for it. I was listening on a Tuesday evening, just doing dishes, and I had to stop and stand there for a moment. First Sergeant Charles Monroe King began writing to his infant son in 2005, understanding that he might not come home from Iraq. He was killed by a roadside bomb on October 14, 2006. His son Jordan was seven months old. The journal was two hundred pages long.
Dana Canedy, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, spent years working this material into A Journal for Jordan. The book operates in two registers simultaneously: it is a reporter’s inquiry into the life of the man she loved, drawing on his letters, his journal, and the testimony of the soldiers who served with him, and it is a mother’s letter to her son about the father he never knew. Those two modes do not always sit comfortably together, and the book does not pretend they do. That honesty is part of what makes it extraordinary.
The Two Hundred Pages He Left Behind
The journal itself is both the book’s subject and one of its primary sources. King wrote to his son in neat block letters, and the excerpts Canedy includes throughout the memoir give the book an eerie double temporality: King writing from the present tense of 2005 and 2006, not knowing how the story ends, and Canedy reading and transcribing from 2007 onward, knowing exactly how it ends. He counseled Jordan on how to withstand disappointment, how to deal with adversaries, how to behave on a date. He wrote about his faith, his love for Dana, and about recovering a young soldier’s body from a destroyed tank, and about the importance of honoring that young man’s life.
That last detail is the one that stopped me. King was writing a journal for his son about fatherhood and love, and he included in it a description of recovering human remains from a burning vehicle, because he wanted his son to understand what honor looks like under conditions that test it to the limit. That’s not the journal of a man performing devotion. It’s the journal of someone trying to pass something real on before the opportunity was gone.
Two Seemingly Mismatched Souls
Canedy is honest about the complications of her relationship with Charles. They were, by her account, an unlikely pairing: a driven, ambitious journalist from one world, a career soldier from another, navigating a relationship across the distance and silence and fear that military service imposes. The book doesn’t romanticize that navigation. It shows the arguments, the stretches of separation, the specific weight of knowing that your partner is in a combat zone and that the next call might be the last one.
James McBride, in the blurb Canedy includes, describes the book as full of wonderful treasures offered by a unique and spirited father, written with serene grace. That phrase, serene grace, is precisely right for certain passages and precisely wrong for others, and the places where the serenity cracks are the book’s most honest moments. Reviewer Nicole, who watched the film adaptation before reading the book, notes that the level of detail in the book makes you feel like you had missed out on so much just by watching the film. That’s the difference between a dramatic adaptation and a document: the book includes everything Charles actually wrote, not a curated selection.
Bahni Turpin and the Weight of What Cannot Be Said
Bahni Turpin’s narration of this book is one of the strongest performances I’ve heard in military memoir audio. She works in a register of contained emotion, carrying Canedy’s grief and love without ever pushing them into sentimentality, maintaining the discipline that the material requires. There are passages where the prose is plainly reporting, where Canedy is assembling documentary evidence rather than processing emotion, and Turpin handles those passages with the same precision she brings to the more openly felt moments. The transition between the two registers, between the journalist and the bereaved mother, is handled with extraordinary skill.
The eight-and-a-half-hour runtime is the right length for this material. The book could have been longer; there is more to say about both Charles and Jordan, and Canedy is clearly aware of that. But the restraint serves the work, keeping it focused on what can be documented and felt rather than what can only be speculated.
Who Should Listen and Who Should Skip
This is one of the most affecting accounts of war’s human cost available in audio, precisely because it is not primarily about combat. It is about what a soldier decides to leave behind for his child, and what a journalist decides to preserve for a country that produced the war that took her fiance. Reviewer Brandi’s description of the book as having sad, happy, uplifting, encouraging, and hopeful parts is accurate, though the sad is substantial. Listeners who need emotional distance from military loss should prepare themselves honestly. Everyone else should listen.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does the audiobook include readings from Charles King’s actual journal, or is it primarily Canedy’s narrative?
The book incorporates extensive excerpts from King’s journal, with Canedy’s narrative framing and contextualizing them. Bahni Turpin reads both registers, and the tonal distinction between King’s direct-address journal entries and Canedy’s retrospective memoir is clearly conveyed in the performance.
How does this audiobook compare to the film adaptation released in 2021?
Multiple reviewers who saw the film first report that the book is significantly richer, because it includes the full texture of King’s journal entries and Canedy’s reporting process, which the film necessarily compressed. The book functions as both memoir and documentary record in ways a feature film cannot replicate.
Is this book primarily a love story, a war memoir, or a grief narrative?
It’s genuinely all three simultaneously, which is part of what makes it unusual in military memoir. Canedy describes it as a mother’s letter to her child, a father’s advice to a son he would never know, a reporter’s inquiry, and a reminder of war’s human cost. The book holds those registers at once rather than choosing among them.
Is A Journal for Jordan appropriate for younger readers or teenagers who may be considering military service?
One reviewer purchased it specifically for a grandson considering military service, and found the author willing to speak directly with that young reader afterward. The book is honest about the costs and the courage of military service in ways that seem appropriate for serious young readers, though the grief content is substantial and sustained.
