The first half of this novel really worked well for me because it was simultaneously a thriller, a mystery, and a horror story. The style of the latter half, with its attention turned toward one of the juvenile characters, was a bit John Green-ish, and though it wrapped up the novel nicely, seemed to lose a bit of its punch.

The Deep End of the Ocean by Jacquelyn Mitchard
Love hearing about the monkey bread!
Beth is registering the family at the hotel and her younger son has at the same time gone missing. Someone must've taken him while the older child looked on.
The police canvas inside and out and can't locate the child. The things that go through her mind as to what could be happening to Ben...
Her husband Pat Cappadora is beside himself also. She was at the hotel for a reunion.
She is just going through the motions of life when 9 years later she thinks she really has seen Ben. She knew it looked exactly what he would've looked like...
They find his knapsack a few years later and again post his picture in the paper in hopes someone has seen him.
She gets involved with her camera again and a boy who mows lawns stops by and she knows it's her son. She shows her husband the pictures of the boy who lives just a few blocks away.
Therapy sessions don't always help but talking to other friends who were there, does. Faith, keep the faith that it will all work out in the end...

I wanted to read this book because I enjoyed another book by this author and I read somewhere a good review of the sequel to this book. When I got it from the library and saw the Oprah's Book Club stamp on it. I was very wary -- I don't always enjoy Oprah's picks, and find them unusually depressing. And the description of this book fit that mold: A happy family is devastated when their three-year-old boy goes missing. The book delves into what happens to the members of the family, not only the parents, but the older brother, younger sister, grandparents, aunts and uncles, and close friends, and focuses on how what happens affects their relationships with each other. I know it doesn't sound too exciting, but I couldn't put it down! In the first half of the book, the story is told from the mother's point of view, and somehow you get a sense of everyone else's feelings just from her interaction with them. The author has a really good way of writing what people are thinking, both the good and bad, the appropriate and inappropriate. Just when I was thinking maybe I'd had enough of all that, there began to be chapters written from the older brother's point of view. And then the story turns into a mystery. The book spans like a ten year time frame, and I couldn't wait to find out how the characters changed and dealt with their changed lives and their relationships with each other. I'll definately be reading the sequel sometime soon!

3.5 stars?

The ending did make me shed a few tears. I loved the brothers and their relationship the most. So heart-wrenching and sweet!  I aww'ed. And appreciated it.

This book was...harrowing. In the ways many family dramas are. Not a light read if you're trying to get cheered up or excited -- it's just so painfully realistic and the everyday pains so tedious that harrowing is the only word I could think of for it.

I don't know if this is a by-product of the 90s and this is how therapy was, but I found the therapy sessions to be so awkward and hard to take seriously. They were paced strangely (especially the group therapy scene). And I'm pretty confident the therapist was breaking many, many rules of professionalism with how he talked to the patient (won't spoil who). It was just cringe-y, but it may be that those scenes simply didn't stand the test of time given how far we've come with mental health resources. Anyway!

I think the beginning, reading more like a thriller, was page-turning, but then it got languid. It is, after all, a drama, not a thriller -- I prefer the later. This felt like reading Marriage Story, the movie, except with more crime and kids involved.

Vincent was an absolute favorite. I always love the angry, emotional adolescent characters. Easier to relate to.

I enjoyed the beginning and the end the most but had a slightly harder time getting through the middle -- this is possibly because I unintentionally spoiled a big reveal for myself by glancing only at the first sentence of the movie's Wikipedia page -- insane that they lead with a spoiler like that. I was so mad! I think it killed the suspense and may read as more exciting to others.

It was a pretty good book. Everyone was human in their flaws. Even if it was written in the 90s, it felt modern. Overall, not a bad read!

What a disappointment after "The Most Wanted"! Impossible to read because horribly written, very unlikeable horrible characters, plus boring to death.

I wasn't sure that I'd like this book at first as the characters were very difficult to sympathise with. But as the story progressed I came to realise that what makes the plot so complex is the flawed nature of the characters. I've read another of Mitchard's novels, A Theory of Relativity, and found the characters rather annoying. In this case, their flaws made them fascinating rather than irritating, and eventually this book became impossible to put down. Not having any children myself, it was hard to imagine how I'd act in such a situation but I still really felt the pain that the family was going through in their grief. I did feel like there were a couple of lose ends that weren't completely tied up at the end about the kidnapper, but all in all I was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed this novel. Recommended to fans of Jodi Picoult and Barbara Delinsky. 9/10

Jacquelyn Mitchard
The Deep End of the Ocean
New York: Viking, 1996
434 pp. $10.20 (Amazon Paperback)
0-670-86579-6

Life for an average suburban family is going by peacefully, until the younger son, Ben, is kidnapped at a high school reunion. Distraught, the mother, Beth, a photographer, goes into mental collapse and wallows in her grief, while the rest of the family is left to fend on their own. The older son, Vincent, who was 7 at the time, feels responsible for his brother’s disappearance and has to grow without the love of his mother and starts showing delinquent behavior. 9 years go by, until Beth meets Sam, a neighborhood boy who offers to mow the lawn. She realizes Sam is her child Ben, who had been living just two blocks away for several years. The Deep End of the Ocean by Jacquelyn Mitchard tells the tale of this family adapting to living without a lost child and his struggle to fit back in with this new family. This book was a slow read and had very little character development. However, the story was written in an interesting way.

After spending more than half the book showing Beth in half frenzy, breaking down after every other mention of the word “Ben”, the author finally moves on with the actual plot and gets to the discovery of Sam. And at that point, she uses the rest of the book to describe the happenings of a few weeks. As a book that describes mainly two events and the mindsets of the people in the story, 434 pages is just way too long to drag the story out to. Also, the characters did not change that much through the story. The only character “development” was Beth turning from a somewhat annoying mother to an even more annoying one to one that felt empowered after finally saying one sentence back to a somewhat annoying one. The other character development was for their older son Vincent, or “Reese” as he calls himself later, who starts off trying to be a good kid, but then feels lonely with his parents ignoring him, thus acting up for attention, and trying to make amends for losing his brother. Besides this, everyone stayed the same from beginning to end, the father, Ben, the little sister, the grandparents, etc.

Even so, I enjoyed reading the book from different perspectives: Beth and Vincent/Reese, although the Vincent view was first introduced pretty far into the novel. Jacquelyn Mitchard had it so we could read into the minds of the two people and what happens around them, while still keeping it in third person. It would have been more enjoyable if more characters were delved into, but it was nice that the author chose to go into a teenager’s mind.

The Deep End of the Ocean was a nice read, though it was extremely long. For long trips or on rainy days, this book would be a good pick, but as a novel, it wasn’t that good.

I have cleared off the bookshelves and made a tall stack of books to read that I purchased in the '90s. Either read them or give them away, I told myself. This book, which started quite slowly for me, was one from the stack.

During the opening chapters, I thought, "Oh no, please don't let it be 400+ pages of a maudlin mother whining and moping over her loss. I cannot take it." I had read Woman in the Window last winter and I was not ready for any more reading of that theme. It was and yet it was so much more, and thus I found myself becoming more and more engaged as the novel progressed.

There were plot twists enough to draw me onward and there were quirky life-sized characters, ones I wanted to be my friends, and people I was glad to never know. Two who stood out were the gay woman cop, with the corny name of Candy Bliss (there’s a story behind that name), or the determined and always loyal friend Ellen, who blazed through the main character's crumbling life and just plain got stuff done. As foils, these two women were strong and resolute when the main character Beth was weak and desperate, and they were not letting any thing or anyone knock them down.

There were minor, single scene characters, like an old man who told a tragic tale at a cemetery that read like a Dickensian scene and reverberated in my mind hours after reading about him. There was an aged mother of an adult woman wacko who keep me wondering, “What did she know? Is she the one who . . .?” And on the novel went, causing my questions and wonderings about characters and the mystery of the disappearance of a three-year-old boy. Meanwhile, the interior life of the boy’s mother, Beth, is laid open over a ten-year period. By itself, this inner exposure would not have carried me 434 pages; however, with the rich development of the world surrounding Beth and the awesome character development, I was captured right till the last word.

I read this book when it was an Oprah selection. Since it takes place in Chicago (I grew up an hour west of there), I could relate to the scenery there. The premise of the story is that a mom, Beth, takes her three children to Chicago for the weekend to attend a high school reunion. While she checks into the hotel, she instructs the children to sit on the bellhops trolley. Of course, what happens next is every parent's worst nightmare: one of the children is missing. The story continues by relating the horror and guilt that Beth must endure as the search for the missing baby continues. The child is not found quickly so Beth and the two children must return home to Madison, WI, and search and recover from there, always waiting for the missing lamb to return.

If you like THIS book, I would recommend Tami Hoag's book, "Night Sins." I told my (then) choir director, Sandy, about "Deep End" as she grew up in Crystal Lake, IL and went to UW-Madison so she would know the terrain very well. When I told her what it was about, she suggested I read "Night Sins." Very similar story although it is set in Northfield, MN (going to the Big Steer on Hwy 19 and 35 was my clue; we went there for breakfast when the bars closed), which is where my alma mater is located. Both are fabulous reads!

This was such a word dense, heavy book to get through. I really enjoyed parts of the story (particularly the middle 100 pages or so). I felt like it had a very slow build up, followed by that section that was compelling, ending with an additional 150/200 pages of drawn out drama that’s ending left me unsatisfied. The writing was well done - poetic without feeling over the top - but it was just too long. I couldn’t agree with Beth’s choices in the end, and her relationship with Vincent was awful to read. She left me with such a bad taste in my mouth. I dunno, it wasn’t a bad book, it just could have been better!

Blurb:
'Watch your brother,' says Beth Cappadora to her seven-year-old son Vincent. Only minutes later she turns again and asks, 'Where's Ben?' It's the moment that every mother fears: for three-year-old Ben is gone. And no one can find him. Despite a police search that becomes a nationwide obsession, Ben has vanished, leaving behind a family that will be torn apart with anguish. Until, nine years later, the undreamed-of happens: a twelve-year-old boy knocks on their door - a boy who does not know them, but who will irrevocably twist their lives a second time.'

I couldn't resist the temptation to read this book. It has terrible parallels with the Madeleine McCann disappearance. Whose fault was it? Was the mother to blame? The mother who refuses to believe her child is dead while the rest of the world thinks she's mad. His brother - mentally scarred for life. And then a boy rings the doorbell, and their dream comes true. Ben is alive! You would expect this to be the end of the book, but it's not by a long way. Where has he been for the past nine years, and why did nobody realise it was him? How could a 12-year-old who doesn't remember his real family, fit in again? Is it possible?

The previous reader found this depressing. In some ways it is, to contemplate whether somebody could take a child. But we all know it happens. The terrible thing in this story is not what happens to Ben, but what happens to his family left behind. And that is sad, rather than depressing. I found this book difficult to get into, but once I'd struggled through a couple of chapters trying to remember who everybody was, I was hooked.

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I was shocked by what this book really ended up being about. I pictured the heartbreaking struggle of a mother who lost her child and what the family went through...and there is a little of that, but then, there is a twist and half the book deals more with how the family relates with each other after the ordeal.

I've read some people who are just completely abhorred by the actions of the mother, but I thought it was very realistic as to how a person in this situation might act. The mother in this story becomes very depressed and acts erratically. I would say that would be expected. I really didn't dislike her character as much as many did. She did do one unforgivable thing...but at the same time, you know she's not thinking straight.

Immediately after reading the book, I looked up the movie online. It was in parts on YouTube. I just wanted to see how it played on-screen. It didn't really come off quite as powerful on the screen. I think it was the overdone musical score.

Overall, it was a worthwhile read and halfway through the book, after the twist happens and the heartrending complications start, you find yourself asking some VERY tough questions. You have no idea whose side to be on and it all starts breaking your heart because there are about five distinct points of view about the situation and all of them are offering up good points. It gets very emotional and is a great book to discuss with other people.