NO TIME TO WAVE GOODBYE by Jacqueline Mitchard

This book is the long awaited sequel to the award winning first novel by Jacquelyn Mitchard, The Deep End of the Ocean.  In that story 3-year-old Ben Cappadora is kidnapped from a hotel lobby where his mother is checking into her 15th high school reunion. His disappearance tears the family apart and invokes separate experiences of anguish, denial, and self-blame. Marital problems and delinquency in Ben's older brother (in charge of him the day of his kidnapping) arise.  Ben returned to his family miraculously after nine years, and the family started to heal but Ben never felt like he belonged.

No Time To Wave Goodbye starts with the Ben/Sam being married with a child, Kerry is studying to be an opera singer, and Vincent still trying to find himself as he still blames himself for Ben's kidnapping, currently working as a filmmaker.  He has a wonderful idea for a documentary but knows his family won't understand his idea and it will probably create more family problems before it heals any.  His idea is to focus on five families caught in the same place his family was after Ben was taken. The only way to get this film to work and to get people to tell their stories is to get his brother Ben involved, which takes a bit of begging and pleading but he finally agrees.

The film turns out to be a huge success, earning an Academy Award for best documentary.  While the family is celebrating the unthinkable happens and this family is swept up in a situation that brings the past to life again.

I was one of the people who really wanted to know what happened to this family.  After you read a book like The Deep End of the Ocean you find yourself entwined in the family's life and you need to know what happened.  The author even tells us the reason the sequel took so long was that she didn't think she could write it. On her website she says "And suddenly, in the midst of working on another book, I knew. I knew the story that would become No Time to Wave Goodbye, the book I hope you’re now holding in your hands. It was the most natural thing in the world. "

No Time To Wave Goodbye is Jacquelyn Mitchard at her best.  This story will grab you from page 1 and will have you crying by page 185 and will have your spine tingling by the end of the book.  You will never forget this story.  It's a powerful sequel that is just as good as the first maybe even better.

 

I am so happy that Jacquelyn Mitchard calls Wisconsin home.  She doesn't live far from this blogger with husband and seven children. She is completing her next adult novel and continues as a contributing editor for the Disney parenting magazine Wondertime, as well writing pieces for More, Parade and Real Simple, among other magazines. Her syndicated column for Tribune Media appears in newspapers around the nation.  To find out more about this wonderful author please visit her web page http://www.jacquelynmitchard.com/