No Time to Wave Goodbye: A Novel (Random House Reader's Circle)
Book DescriptionNew York Timesbestselling author Jacquelyn Mitchard captured the heart of a nation withThe  Deep End of the Ocean, her celebrated debut novel about mother Beth Cappadora, a child kidnapped, a  family in crisis. Now, inNo Time to Wave Goodbye, the unforgettable Cappadoras are in peril once  again, forced to confront an unimaginable evil.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.No Time to Wave Goodbyeis Jacquelyn Mitchard at her best, a spellbinding novel about family  loyalty, and love pushed to the limits of endurance.An Essay by Jacquelyn MitchardMotherhood—The SequelHow I grieved when my three older sons—“gen one” of my seven children—began to achieve  young manhood. Every inch they grew made me shrink a little inside. The older they got, the less they  would need me. I’d lost the sweet confidences, heartfelt hugs and even unruly tears of the little boys  I’d known as a first-time mom. And I thought I had lost my sons.How wrong I was.Sure, I still miss those first little boys (although my youngest children today are little boys, too,  just three and five). I still miss my effortless size six jeans, too. I haven’t seen them since.But the way I feel about my older sons took me completely by surprise—as does the way they feel  about me.Like my character Beth Cappadora inNo Time To Wave Goodbye, I thought motherhood was  time-limited, a vocation that required gear, mittens with zippers, and car seats and bags of Cheerios.   When I put away childish things, I felt, just as Beth did, that I’d outlived my usefulness to growing  guys. I was just a sweet-and-sour relic of their past and. While I was anything but “finished” with  them, they were more than finished with me. But that turned out to be only adolescence.As they grew older, I learned that they needed their mother differently, but equally urgently, as  they did when they needed me to hold their spoons.It’s against me that they practice the beliefs I tried to instill  (the ones they now praise as  genuinely as they previously rejected them). It’s with me that they offer a more quaint and tender  courtship than they give their girlfriends—only the flowers on the bedside table are roses instead  of dandelions.I never imagined the bond I would feel when I heard Marty, 19, sing on a stage in front of 500  people—and saw him search the crowd for my face. I never anticipated the thrill of accompanying my  22-year-old chef-in-training to dinner and listening with quiet pride as he ordered for both of us. I  marvel as my Rob, 25, (a fiercely indifferent high school student) now worries every college grade to an  A—then turns to me for approval.And so the “sequel” to my biggest bestselling novel,The Deep End of the Ocean, is more than a tale of  a family tested beyond the limits of endurance, twice in a lifetime. It’s a story that reflects so much  of what I’ve learned in 13 intervening years since the book was published. Love that changes isn’t love  lost; just as mist and ice are only water in another form, equally lovely.Beth Cappadora learns more than how tough she really is in her sons’ time of agony inNo Time To  Wave Goodbye. She learns that she’s still a mother and she still matters.And so did I.—Jacquelyn Mitchard(Photo © Liane R. Harrison)--This text refers to theHardcoveredition.