Warning: Spoiler Follows

I’m always looking for examples of feats of writing magic. Here’s one:  Jacquelyn Mitchard’s “The Deep End of the Ocean.”

In order to tell you what it accomplishes, I’m afraid I have to spoil it.

The book is about the kidnapping of a 3-year-old. He resurfaces years later. What struck me about this  book is that Mitchard makes both sides — the family who, naturally, wants the son back, and the people who’ve been harboring him all this time — seem sympathetic.

Any writer who can make a kidnapper sympathetic enough that the reader is torn as to who should have the child is a good writer indeed.

Check it out.

~ by seriouswriter on June 11, 2007.