224 pages
Genre: Contemporary Fiction
Meets these 2010 Reading Challenges:
My Rating: 2.5 stars
Synopsis from Amazon:
“It has been twenty-two years since Beth Cappadora’s three-year-old son Ben was abducted. By some miracle, he returned nine years later, and the family began to pick up the pieces of their lives. But their peace has always been fragile: Ben returned from the deep end as another child and has never felt entirely at ease with the family he was born into. Now the Cappadora children are grown: Ben is married with a baby girl, Kerry is studying to be an opera singer, and Vincent has emerged from his troubled adolescence as a fledgling filmmaker.
The subject of Vincent’s new documentary, “No Time to Wave Goodbye,” shakes Vincent’s unsuspecting family to the core; it focuses on five families caught in the tortuous web of never knowing the fate of their abducted children. Though Beth tries to stave off the torrent of buried emotions, she is left wondering if she and her family are fated to relive the past forever.
The film earns tremendous acclaim, but just as the Cappadoras are about to celebrate the culmination of Vincent’s artistic success, what Beth fears the most occurs, and the Cappadoras are cast back into the past, revisiting the worst moment of their lives—with only hours to find the truth that can save a life. High in a rugged California mountain range, their rescue becomes a desperate struggle for survival.”
My Thoughts:
I absolutely adored DEEP END OF THE OCEAN. I thought it was phenomenally written, with raw emotion and deep character development. When I saw that there was a sequel, I was ecstatic! I’ve been curious what happened to the beloved Cappadoras’.
I wish I hadn’t opened that Pandora’s box.
This book was nothing at all like the first novel. I felt no real connection to the characters or what happened to them. The writing was choppy and haphazardly thrown together. I had to re-read several passages because I couldn’t understand how they were supposed to sound grammatically! The plot was ho-hum at best, with many new characters thrown into the mix, without rhyme or reason. There were so many characters that I had to keep re-reading things to figure out who was who and why they were in the story! There were so many shifts in POV that it got very confusing to the reader about who was narrating and why. Even after finishing the book, I have no idea what the motivation was behind the “bad guys” acting the way they did. A lot of it just didn’t come together for me. I was left feeling really disappointed and wanting to go back and read DEEP END OF THE OCEAN, just to recapture the magic of the Cappadoras’ This is one of those situations where you are hoping for a sequel, but when it comes out, you wish there wasn’t one!
I love Jacquelyn Mitchard, but this book isn’t anything like I’m used to reading from her. This was disappointing, at best.
I seem to be having a really bad month of reading!! Sorry for all the ho-hum reviews, but I have yet to read something that I want to rave about!!
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This is the second review I've read for this book and it was along the same lines. How disappointing. =(
I agree with your consensus. I couldn't tell if the characters were all new or if I should remember them, and I realized I didn't care. I'm glad I read it, but I didn't care for it. My review is here.