Jacquleyn oitchard’s first book, The Deep End of the ocean, was the first-ever novel chosen for oprah’s book club and it catapulted Jacquelyn into the limelight and on to the bestseller list. In that story, a mother loses sight of her three-year-old child at a school reunion and he disappears. What may be worse, and what the book examines, is what happens years later when the kid comes back.
Imagine what that would do to a family! Like Jodi Picoult’s novels, Jacquelyn oitchard’s have that “What if?” quality that makes them exceptionally readable, especially as they are not about spies or cowboys or politicians or policemen. They’re about ordinary folk like us.
In Still Summer, her latest novel, another family is put through a different kind of test. A group of four school friends, 20 years down the track, decide to go on a Caribbean sailing trip to help the most glamorous one among them get over the death of her husband.
When one of the four has to pull out, middle-aged mum Tracy invites her bratty teenage daughter Cammie along. Cue trouble when the ship’s captain turns out to be a spunky 25-year-old who has a way with the ladies. But that’s not the half of it.
Just two days into their trip, the whole thing turns to custard and the women are left to fend for themselves in waters infested with modern-day pirates and, possibly more dangerous, long-hidden secrets and resentments.
It’s a sort of Jilly-Cooperish cross between Dead Calm and Lord of the Flies, and although it took a while to heat up (get them on the boat already, Jacquelyn!), I found it quite a page-turner and I shed many a tear towards the end. It should come as no surprise that this author writes so authentically about mothers and children she has seven kids herself.
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