The Deep End of the Ocean
First edition cover
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| Author | Jacquelyn Mitchard |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Novel |
| Publisher | Allen Lane |
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Publication date
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June 1996 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback& Paperback) |
| Pages | 434 pp (hardback edition) & 528 pp (paperback edition) |
| ISBN | (hardback edition) & (paperback edition) |
| OCLC | 33443698 |
| 813/.54 20 | |
| LC Class | PS3563.I7358 D4 1996 |
The Deep End of the Ocean is a best-selling novel by Jacquelyn Mitchard, released in 1996. It is about an American middle class, suburban family that is torn apart when the youngest son is kidnapped and raised by a mentally ill woman, until he appears at the front doorstep of his real mother and asks if he can mow the lawn.
Wisconsin photographer and housewife Beth Cappadora leaves her youngest son, Ben, alone with his older brother for a brief moment in a crowded Chicago hotel lobby, while attending her high school reunion. The older son lets go of Ben's hand and Ben vanishes without a trace. Beth goes into an extended mental breakdown and it is left to her husband and owner of a restaurant, Pat, to force his wife to robotically care for their remaining two children, 7-year-old Vincent and infant daughter Kerry.
Nine years later a young boy named Sam asks Beth if she needs the lawn mowed. Beth suspects that this boy who lives with his "father" two blocks away is in fact her lost son, and while Sam mows the lawn, she takes photographs of him to show to her husband and teenage son, who then says that he suspected the boy's true identity all along. The parents contact Detective Candy Bliss who pops in to offer wise, albeit often cryptic and conflicting, advice to Beth. It is learned that at the reunion in Chicago, the celebrity alumna Cecil Lockhart kidnapped Ben, renamed him Sam, and raised him as her own child until she was committed to a mental hospital, leaving Sam to be raised in a house only two blocks from the Cappadoras, by his adoptive father, the sensitive and intellectual George Karras.
Ben was raised by a Greek-American father for nine years, while his biological parents are Italian-American. Ben is a polite, intelligent American boy who takes great pride in participating in Greek cultural rituals, much to the frustration of Pat who wants to pretend that Ben was never really abducted. Ben is faced with the cultural identity that he grew up with, and the cultural identity he would have known had he not been kidnapped.
Ben's adoptive father agrees to surrender Ben to his birth family, while still living two blocks away. Torn between two worlds and having lost both of the parents that he knew, Ben expresses suicidal feelings to Beth.
Ben's only memory of his biological family is one of brother Vincent and thus over a one-on-one basketball game he absolves his brother of any responsibility for his abduction, and agrees to return to live with the Cappadoras.
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