Friday Fiction: Jacquelyn Mitchard

--by Hanje Richards

Jacquelyn Mitchard (born December 10, 1951) is an American journalist and author. She is the author of the best-selling novel The Deep End of the Ocean, which was the first selection for Oprah's Book Club, on September 17, 1996. She became a newspaper reporter in 1976, eventually achieving a position as lifestyle columnist for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel newspaper. Her weekly column, "The Rest of Us: Dispatches from the Mother Ship," appeared in 125 newspapers nationwide until she retired it in 2007. Mitchard is a contributing editor for PARADE and Wondertime and is featured regularly in Reader's Digest, Good Housekeeping, Hallmark, and other publications.

Mitchard says: “I'm very interested in the truth that anyone's life could be a novel. It's a fact, you know. Most people live lives of very noisy desperation, and I'm often told by readers and cab drivers and professors that if I only knew what had happened in their own lives — well, they're entirely correct. Behind every lighted window you see as you walk through a neighborhood at night is a whole, fully formed drama of pity, passion, terror, elation, hope, abandonment, discovery, contentment. The people I write about were going about their lives when some event caught them in the headlights.”

Breakdown Lane - An advice columnist for a local newspaper, Julieanne Gillis dispenses wisdom to her readers but somehow missed the signs that something was amiss in her own home. Devoted to being a good mother and keeping her twenty-year marriage fresh and exciting, she is shocked by her husband's surprise announcement that he needs a “sabbatical” from their life together — and devastated when he disappears, leaving Julie with no funds to raise two teenagers and a small daughter alone. But it is the discovery that Julieanne suffers from a serious illness that truly crumbles her family's foundation — setting her children on a dangerous, quixotic journey to locate their missing father before it's too late.

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.Cage of Stars - Twelve-year-old Veronica Swan's idyllic life in a close-knit Mormon community is shattered when her two younger sisters are brutally murdered. Although her parents find the strength to forgive the deranged killer, Scott Early, Veronica cannot do the same. Years later, she sets out alone to avenge her sisters' deaths, dropping her identity and severing ties in the process. As she closes in on Early, Veronica will discover the true meaning of sin and compassion, before she makes a decision that will change her and her family's lives forever.

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.Deep End of the Ocean - Three-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) ensue. Mitchard depicts the family's friction and torment — along with many gritty realities of family life..
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Most Wanted - A naive teenage girl in south Texas falls in love with her prison pen pal. The object of her affection — a charming, dangerously handsome young felon who romances her through his letters to her. After a love affair that defies all conventions, they marry and have a child while the father is still imprisoned. But when he escapes prison to claim his wife and child, what started as a passionate romance turns into a terrifying ordeal of obsession and desire. The young girl's only hope is a fiercely dedicated public aid lawyer who is more of a mother figure than the girl has ever known, and the only one who can avert disaster for mother and child!

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Still Summer - A harrowing tale of four women lost at sea and pitted against nature and a cohort of contemporary pirates. Tracy, Holly and Olivia have known each other since high school, when they were glamorous, popular troublemakers. Twenty-five years after graduation, the three women, plus Tracy's 19-year-old daughter, Camille, set out on a "reading, sunning, gossiping" trip aboard a luxe sailboat helmed by a two-man crew. But a storm leaves the women adrift with no sail or engine and their co-captains gone overboard. With limited sailing experience, failing radio equipment and a rapidly diminishing cache of food and water, the women are vulnerable to the worst threats the Caribbean can offer — the elements, sharks and, most troublesome, pirates.

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Theory of Relativity - Having perished in a wreck, Georgia and Ray McKenna leave behind an orphaned one-year-old girl named Keefer — and handsome, self-involved Gordon McKenna decides to adopt his adored sister's child. Unfortunately, that's not what his affluent in-laws have in mind. The ensuing custody battle turns into a protracted legalistic horror show, complete with appeals, retrials, PR campaigns, and even last-minute legislation.

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Twelve Times Blessed - It is True Dickinson's birthday and her best friends have gathered on this snowy night to celebrate — yet True has never felt more alone. Though her small business is thriving and her young son is happy, the death of her husband eight years ago has left an empty space in her life that friends and family cannot fill. Suddenly, it seems that youth and beauty are slipping away while True is busily taking care of everyone else. But on this night, an accident on an icy road will offer True the golden opportunity to let love back into her life — if she can somehow conquer her fears.