It’s every parent’s worst nightmare.
No, no, I’m not referring to the premise of this book. I’m referring to the nightmare of losing yourself in a book like this, finding yourself swallowed up by the intrigue and heartbreak to the point where you can hardly put the book down and as a result end up staying up late into the night to finish…and then have to be on your “A” game as mom the next day.
Ugh.
But this book truly is about every parent’s worst nightmare…or at least one of them. Beth Cappadora, a thirty-something mother of three, solidly – if not happily – married, takes her children with her for the weekend of her 15th high school reunion…and her three-year-0ld son vanishes. Kidnapped. Gone without a trace, save for the one red shoe that fell off his small foot in the parking lot.
For nearly ten years the search goes on. Leads grow cold. Public interest, which was once sky-high, wanes. Beth finds herself trapped between the mother she needs to be and the mother she can’t be. We see her relationships fray as friends, family, and even the police detective assigned to her case can’t help her re-engage in life. Beth simply exists.
All of a sudden, one day, a miracle. A miracle that would appear to bring a happy ending. A miracle that would – in theory – make Beth and her family whole once again, emotionally, physically, relationally.
And it is this journey – the journey after the miracle – that makes this book worth reading. Real life is not often simple. Relationships are complex and complicated. Families are never perfect and rarely even functional. Happy endings, while satisfying in the movies, are far from realistic.
Jacquelyn Mitchard tackles these difficult issues with keen insight. We ache with Beth over the loss of her son…both the one kidnapped and the one she abandoned. We champion her marriage and our desire to see it survive, knowing it’s an against-all-odds proposition. We find ourselves lost with her, vacillating between wanting to slap her across the face and shout “snap out of it!” to wrapping her in a blanket and gently suggesting “take it easy…you’ve been through so much.”
The language is rough, but then so is the subject matter. There is no solid bedrock of faith, only the hint of anger at a God that would allow such tragedy to occur. But we are carried through the story as if we are a part of it, and we can understand, even empathize with such reactions. And in the end, there is no Cinderella story. Just like life, there is no easy solution, no quick fix, no cure-all. We’re left – much like the Cappadora family – to find our own solution, to come to our own conclusions, and to find an uneasy peace in the waning storm.