The shallow end of the ocean.

No Time to Wave Goodbye
Jacquelyn Mitchard

As a teenager, one of my favorite YA books was The Face on the Milk Carton by Caroline B. Cooney, the story of a girl who sits down to lunch at her middle school one day and recognizes the face of the missing child on her milk carton as herself, and learns she was kidnapped by her parents years and years ago. I was fascinated by the very premise, and re-read the book again and again, so it makes sense on of my favorite books of my late teens and early twenties was Jacquelyn Mitchard's The Deep End of the Ocean, the story of the Cappadora family, whose son Ben was kidnapped at age three. Nine years later, he appears at the house, wanting to mow their lawn for a little pocket money. It turns out he was alive and well that whole time they thought he was dead, living with his loving step-father, the man who married Ben's kidnapper, who passed Ben off as her own child. Neither Ben nor his step-father had any idea that Ben was kidnapped, and Ben has no memory of his birth family, and doesn't want to live with them, but wants the only father he's ever known, instead. When the book ends, the Cappadoras have reached a tenuous agreement that they will share Ben between the families, for his own sake.

No Time to Wave Goodbye picks up a dozen years after Deep End left off. Ben is married, now, with a baby of his own, and seems to have been assimilated to some extent into his birth family. He's married, his wife is the daughter of his mother Beth's best friend, and he's a father himself. But he still maintains close ties with the man who raised him, and still refuses to be called Ben, preferring Sam, the name his kidnapper gave him, which breaks his mother's heart. Ben's brother Vincent is a fledgling filmmaker, and when he creates a documentary about kidnapping victims that becomes hugely popular, these old wounds are opened for the family again.

Sounds good so far, right? Well, it is good or at least passable for the first twenty pages. But then everything goes to shit and what follows is the worst type of sensationalist, melodramatic drivel that I've ever read. Without spoiling anything in case you want to read it (but please, don't read this book, you shouldn't) this plot features: a trip to the Academy Awards, another kidnapping for the Cappadora family, a mountain climbing accident, a gunfight, a murder, and a pat little resolution of all the loose ends that I thought had been resolved quite nicely in Deep End. In short, I think Mitchard forgot the thing that made her first novel in this pair so successful and moving: that it was an ordinary family (like ours!) struggling with mind-blowing events. There's nothing ordinary about these Cappadoras--I feel like I've never met them before. I couldn't relate to them at all.

There was a time, I think, when Mitchard could have been considered a serious writer; Deep End was one of the more literary of Oprah's book club choices; A Theory of Relativity was a solid, if sentimental, look at adoption. The Breakdown Lane veers into women's fiction wish-fulfillment territory, and is sort of a divorced mom's Cinderella, but still engaging. It's only recently, in her last few books, that Mitchard seems to have veered off entirely into Danielle Steel or Maeve Binchy territory. Twelve Times Blessed, while compelling in places, was basically written for the post-menopausal romance set. Still Summer was a ghastly, and bizarre, account of a sailing trip among middle-aged friends, which features pirates and shipwrecks and shark attacks and all other manner of outlandish events. And now, No Time to Wave Goodbye further brings down the Mitchard oeuvre, with its stilted prose, fantastical happenings, and poorly-drawn characters.

If Mitchard has two sets of books, her "real" books and her "fluff" books, this book is a sort of hybrid, that takes the worst parts of both and meshes them together. You have the family tension from her earlier works, and the wtf-moments of her later works, all pressed together into one very slim, novella-ish novel. And when I say slim, I mean slim: I paid fifteen cents a page for the privilege of reading this in hardback. And look at the cover! I try not to judge a book by the cover, but if I did in this case, it would be a perfect reflection of the words within: pale, anemic, insubstantial.

I can't help but wonder what on earth made Mitchard want to take up this story for a second time. It's weird that she would. You see, Deep End of the Ocean is pretty finished the way it was. The ending was not ambiguous, and you already had a clear idea of what would happen next: Ben and the Cappadora family would struggle to mesh their lives together before eventually accomplishing some sort of normal family interaction. We don't need to know the particulars of how it happened, just that it would, and Mitchard makes it pretty clear that it will happen. Going back to hoe this familiar ground a second time feels cheap, and coupled with the books length (214 pages?) it feels like a very amateurish fanfiction featuring the original characters. I have the sneaking suspicion that Mitchard dictated this book. At the very least, I can definitively say she phoned it in. It was like she felt she ought to write another book, and couldn't think of an a fresh idea, and so she decided to write this emotionally empty continuation of her most famous work just for the sake of getting something on the shelves in time for Christmas. It contributes nothing to the original story--it feels like she's cannibalizing her own flesh.

The worst part is that these characters are still struggling with the same issues they struggled with in the first book: Ben still feels like he's not one of the family. Vincent still feels guilty for letting his brother be taken. Kerry still tries every way she can to grab her parents' attention. Beth and Pat still wonder how this could have happened to them? These are all, every one of them, issues which were supposedly resolved at the end of the first book. And now they're not, again?

Not recommended, especially if you loved The Deep End of the Ocean. Trust me: you'll like the characters more without revisiting them this second time.

Rating: 1 of 5 stars.