News & Notes
The reviews are in for No Time to Wave Goodbye- see what critics have to say.
“As a twist of mystery keeps the pages turning, Mitchard explores the resilience of love in the face of ‘the dark river where this whole family had nearly drowned.’ GOODBYE is a worthy follow-up as well as a satisfying stand-alone.” --PEOPLE Magazine "Mitchard is a skillful storyteller. She addresses human failings and uncertainties with panache and presents a very believable story in a straight forward and no-nonsense manner. No Time To Wave Goodbye is thought provoking and entertaining at the same time. Mitchard leaves the reader wishing for more."--Kathy Habel, Fredricksburg Freelance Star
"This action-packed and emotionally rich drama is every bit as satisfying as its predecessor." Publishers Weekly-starred review
PUBLICATION MONTH TRIFECTA!!!
Read Jackie's stories in Glamour, Good Housekeeping and Parade.
On the true-life story in Glamour, Jackie said, "It was the most painful thing I ever wanted to write."
In Good Housekeeping, the short story 'Avery If It's a Girl,' puts Jackie "in the same issue, but not the same league, with the great Lorrie Moore." Parade's feature, 'In Search of the Perfect Apple,' is ... edible art. (Please, forgive me for that ...)
Read Publisher's Weekly starred review of No Time to Wave Goodbye, Jacquelyn Mitchard's thrilling sequel to her best-selling novel The Deep End of the Ocean.
No Time to Wave Goodbye-Jacquelyn Mitchard. Random, $25 (208p) ISBN 978-1-4000-6774-9Mitchard returns to the Cappadoras from The Deep End of the Ocean (Oprah's first book club pick), proving that, sometimes, sequels work. In this harrowing outing, set 13 years after the events of Ocean, the oldest Cappadora son, Vincent, 29, has become a filmmaker, and with the help of his brother, Ben (who was kidnapped in the first book), and sister, Kerry, makes a documentary about child abduction. When the film is nominated for an Academy Award, the family is pushed into the scrutinizing eye of the public, and then tragedy strikes with the disappearance of Ben's daughter, plunging the family into a riveting ordeal that takes them from Hollywood to a grim, middle-of-nowhere confrontation. Along the way, family bonds are stretched to the breaking point, and Mitchard charts a tormented family dynamic with shocking ease. This action-packed and emotionally rich drama is every bit as satisfying as its predecessor. (Sept.)
The New York Times Book Review of My Little Red Book
March 15, 2009
There Will Be Blood
By ALEXANDRA JACOBS
MY LITTLE RED BOOK
Edited by Rachel Kauder Nalebuff
The news that someone has published a bunch of women’s memories of their first menstrual period is bound to provoke snickers, if not sneers. Ever since the success of “The Bitch in the House,” a 2002 anthology of personal musings by frustrated upper-middle-class wives, editors have enthusiastically hacked the layer cake of modern female experience into narrower and narrower slices. Have you fretted about money? Suffered through a painful break-up? Had a close gay male pal? There’s an anthology for you, sister girlfriend.
But . . . periods? Really? What’s next, a collection of ruminative essays about bowel movements?
Yet there’s much that is distinctive about “My Little Red Book,” named in touching homage to Chairman Mao’s revolutionary manifesto. For one, it wasn’t compiled by a professional, but by one Rachel Kauder Nalebuff, a soon-to-be Yale undergraduate and avid unicyclist who has been amassing anecdotes about other ladies’ “Aunt Flo” — now there’s an icebreaker for the freshman mixer! — since she welcomed her own at age 12, stuffing paper towels into her bathing suit during a water-skiing expedition with her grandparents in Florida.
Though it includes contributions from Erica Jong, author of the ovular sexual-liberation novel “Fear of Flying” (she was on the ocean liner Île de France when she got her period), and Cecily von Ziegesar, creator of the popular Gossip Girl series of young adult novels (she was, incongruously, wearing overalls and walking goats), the bulk of the material is from obscure sources, and cloaked in fewer pseudonyms than one might expect. Young Ms. Nalebuff deserves points for striving for socioeconomic diversity in a genre too often devoted to the concerns of 30-something white magazine writers in Park Slope. There are reminiscences from grandmothers and instant-messaging teenagers; from women in Turkey and Ghana and India; from entrepreneurs and poets — including one whose daughter’s menses inspires her to exult: “Tonight you delight me like a lover / so that my thigh muscles twitch.”
Indeed, “My Little Red Book” is as much a referendum on mothering styles as a mass chronicle of menstruation, whose details, frankly, grow mundane upon repetition: the widening surprise splotch, the cramps, the sense of life’s great unfairness. Customarily told the news first, some moms laugh, others cry, others distribute supplies without visible emotion. They humiliate (by telling everyone in sight); or intimidate (issuing dire warnings about teen pregnancy); or celebrate, with florid gifts and arcane ritual.
What they don’t do enough of, it seems, is instruct. In advance of the big event would be nice. A startling number of storytellers gathered herein believed, decades after Francie Nolan in “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” that the rite of passage signified by the blood exiting their bodies was death (one contributor, heartbreakingly, burning her stained underwear in an effort to spare her loved ones the bad tidings). Or that, as virgins, they could not use tampons.
Into the void left by absent-minded mothers beam advertisers, health-ed teachers and Judy Blume, a kind of Glinda the Good Witch of American adolescence. The protagonist of her young-adult classic “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret” walks around in perpetual anticipation of her first menses outfitted with sanitary napkins — “a bit like those doomsday prophets who wear the sandwich boards,” dryly remarks one former fan quoted here.
A more surprising heroine materializes in the form of Jacquelyn Mitchard, best known as the author of Oprah’s maiden book-club pick, “The Deep End of the Ocean,” and mother of seven, who tells her daughter Francie, a sixth-grader: “This means that your body is getting ready to be a woman, not that you are a woman. When you are a woman is up to you.”
Alexandra Jacobs is an editor at The New York Observer.
Publishers Weekly review of Because I Love Her: 34 Women Writers Reflect on the Mother-Daughter Bond Edited by Andrea N. Richesin.
This intimate collection of writing explores the complex relationship of mothers and daughters. In The Mother Load, Jacquelyn Mitchard, even as a grown woman and mother herself, feels “nothing truly bad can ever happen if my mother is around.” Joyce Maynard recalls My Mother at Fifty and talks about how her mother's decision to stay in an unhappy marriage because of her and her sister helped her through her own painful divorce. Tara Bray Smith, whose mother battled drug addiction, discusses grief, pain and acceptance in her essay “In the Offing”—“the wonderful thing about adulthood is realizing that we are all deficient, and after a certain point no one is accountable for that but ourselves.” The beauty of this collection, edited by Richesin (editor of The May Queen) is the realization that, despite mothers “good” and “bad,” suicidal, depressed, divorced, neglectful, all the women here remain hopeful—for themselves, their mothers and their own children, who they understand are undeniably shaped by all that has happened and can use this knowledge to face what lies ahead. (Apr.)
Kirkus review of Look Both Ways: A Midnight Twins Novel
April 2, 2009 (Razorbill) Meredith and Mallory are 13-year-old twins with unusual gifts: One can see incidents from the past, the other, the future. These gifts have both lured them into danger and helped them find their way out again (The Midnight Twins, 2008). They hoped their gifts would go away and leave them with normal lives as high-school freshman, despite their Grandmother’s explanation of their uniqueness. A vision that causes Mallory to wake up screaming as this sequel gets underway, however, demonstrates that this will not be the case. Here Mitchard weaves together two plotlines, one involving a sabotaged cheerleader and the other the plight of a Native American friend rebelling against her own gifts and ordained tribal position. The first is decidedly less interesting than the second, but the dual stories serve to highlight the differences between the twins. There are enough references to the first novel to pique readers’ interest, but this sequel stands on its own. The primary protagonists are well drawn and the secondary characters are intriguing. Rich details of family and community life add warmth and texture to this supernatural mystery. (Mystery. 12 & up
Publishers Weekly review of The Midnight Twins
The Midnight Twins
Jacquelyn Mitchard. Razorbill, $16.99 (240p) ISBN 978-1-59514-160-6
Experimenting with genre, Mitchard (The Deep End of the Ocean; All We Know of Heaven, Reviews, May 26) proffers the first of a projected trilogy about identical twins Mallory and Meredith, born two minutes apart—one on New Year's Eve, the other on New Year's Day. The two are perfect opposites, mirrors of each other; they share each other's dreams and feel each other's thoughts—until their 13th birthday, when they nearly die in a terrible fire that has been deliberately set. The fire leaves one of them scarred—they are no longer physically identical—and both of them endowed with psychic powers: one can see the future, the other far into the past. However familiar some of these elements, Mitchard uses them to conjure genuine horror in the form of a villain who begins by torturing neighborhood pets and graduates to murdering young women. The plot moves quickly, propelled by the mysteries of the sisters' relationship. Members of the target audience will be particularly vulnerable to the twins' heightened intimacy and extra-sensitive to any possibility of rupture; the girls' supernatural knowledge is a delicious bonus. Ages 12–up. (July)
Watch Jackie on Good Morning America Now
Jackie is interviewed by GMA Now's Lois Cahall on February 19, 2008. Watch the video.
Jackie's New Essay in CHOICE
Jackie's story about surrogate parenthood, 'The Ballad of Bobbie Jo,' its complexities and ecstasies, is the first essay in the collection CHOICE, described in October's Vanity Fair as: "From adoption to abortion, birth to infertility, Karen E. Bender and Nina de Gramont's anthology of stunningly honest essays encompasses all the contradictions and complicated emotions surrounding CHOICE." Booklist also had kudos for the anthology, upcoming October 19 from MacAdam/Cage.
Essay May Become Broadway Show
Dana Bedford's witty, funny anthology, Blindsided by a Diaper: Over 30 Men and Women Reveal How Parenthood Changes a Relationship from Three Rivers Press, (ital), in which Jackie's essay on becoming a parent when you've lost your own as a teenager, is under serious discussion to become a Broadway show.
Three Novels to be Reissued!
Jackie's novels The Most Wanted, A Theory of Relativity and The Breakdown Lane have been acquired by and are being reissued in Great Britain, Australia and South Africa by John Murray.
Onward to Fiji...
In connection with the organizers of the Maui Writers Conference, Jackie will teach in April at a writer's retreat in Fiji. Details can be found on the Maui Writers Conference website.
Deep End of the Ocean #2 on USA Today's Top 25
USA Today chose 25 books that "...made an impact on readers and the publishing industry over the past quarter-century." Deep End of the Ocean is #2. Read the story.