The Deep End of the Ocean

Rating:
Summary: Full of and real people and neat twists; read it in 2 days!
Review: This book explores the horror of losing a child, but does so with characters that are believable; full of flaws and bad choices. This book explores what happens to their hearts, minds and souls as a family evolves through 10 years after a 3-year old member of the family is kidnapped. Mitchard gets inside the heads of these characters and writes a moving novel that reads like suspense.

Rating:
Summary: Victims make lousy protagonists
Review: Beth's response to Ben's kidnapping may have been realistic, but it was also boring. I just am not interested in reading about a character who sits around being miserable for page after page. Almost any other character would have made a more interesting protagonist. The second star is for this potential, which was unfortunately not realized. I read this on a long flight with nothing else to read. Otherwise, I doubt I would have finished it. *Yawn*

Rating:
Summary: This novel does not live up to its billing.
Review: I purchased THE DEEP END OF THE OCEAN right after Oprah recommended it, but just got around to reading it last week. I thought the entire book was too contrived and I had a hard time plowing through it, even though I was determined to finish it to see what happened. I thought some characters, like Pat, were not sufficiently developed, while others, like Candy, were over-developed. The character I felt the most empathy for was Vincent, who never had a chance once Ben was taken. He and Kerry had to make it on their own, and where was spineless Pat? Anyway, sometimes I read Oprah's choices and sometimes I don't. This is one time I wish I hadn't.

Rating:
Summary: THE BEST BOOK I HAVE EVER READ!
Review: I read "Deep end of the ocean" shortly after giving birth to my first child. At some points I had to stop reading because the emotions were too strong. The characters are not easily likable and although I couldn't identify with Beth, I still could feel her pain. Jacquelyn Mitchard has done a remarkable job with this fisrt novel and I am looking forward to her next book.

Rating:
Summary: WHAT A JOKE!
Review: This has to be one of the worst books I have ever tried to finish. I kept thinking there would be some redeeming quality to this book, but as I choked down one more page I could find none. What was I to relate to? How to be an abusive mother?! I was dissappointed in Oprah for thinking women could relate to this or would even want to.

Rating:
Summary: Not one of the best books that I have ever read
Review: When her lost son came to cut her grass in the middle of the book, the police didn't want to invade the privacy of the man that had the boy. Why didn't they just take finger prints off of the lawn mower and they would have know for sure it was her son...end of story....

Rating:
Summary: This book was captivating.
Review: This novel has affected me like no other has! I hated to put it down. The characters were not easily likable, but I felt that was one of the purposes of this novel. To truely understand the suffering of the characters this approach was necessary. It would have been easy for the author to have made the characters likable, but we would not have been given the opportunity to fully embrace each character with our own scope of emotions. I am sure we would like to think that we ourselves would have handled this tragedy much differently, so the scariest part of this novel is that we, if put in this horrifying situation, would have behaved much like Bethie did. I felt so emotionally attached to this book that when not reading I would occasionally find myself feeling as if something was missing. Now that I have finished the story I am left with a void. Not because the story was incomplete but because I was so completely absorbed with its contents.

Rating:
Summary: Hard to put down
Review: The story has the reader hooked from the first chapter to the last. The reader becomes emotionally connected to Beth and understands the choices she has made.

Rating:
Summary: oh come on, what's the big deal! Oprah!
Review: Well, the story was boring, Beth was the most awful, selfish, self-absorbed person, whom I hated throughout the whole novel. Her character went dead, she refused to do anything to find Ben and she also ceased to be a mother to her two remaining children. I could NOT identify with her at all. Her obsession with the other guy?! What was that? The story was boring and the ending, a true disappoint and unbelievable.

Rating:
Summary: BEN WAS THE LUCKY ONE
Review: Ben was the lucky one to have been kidnapped from this weird and dysfunctional family. Beth was a terrible, selfish mother before and after the kidnapping and she didn't grow or evolve at all. Pat was a martyr. Kerry and Vincent were cruelly neglected. The only lucky one in this depressing book was Ben who ended up being the only one who had a good life.