Two if by sea

Title:

Two if by sea

Author:

Mitchard, Jacquelyn, author.

ISBN:

9781628999518

Personal Author:

Mitchard, Jacquelyn, author.

Edition:

Center Point Large Print edition.

Publication Information:

Thorndike, Maine : Center Point Large Print, 2016.

Physical Description:

592 pages (large print) ; 23 cm

General Note:

Originally published: New York : Simon & Schuster, 2016.

Abstract:

"After losing his family in a tsunami in Brisbane, Australia, former police officer Frank Mercy rescues Ian from a submerged car and takes him home to his Midwestern farm. As the boy exhibits a telepathic gift, Frank and new love Claudia will travel to England to keep him safe from a sinister group who want him back"-- Provided by publisher.

Subject Term:

Child disaster victims -- Fiction.

Telepathy -- Fiction.

Farm life -- Fiction.

Large type books.

Large type books. (OCoLC)fst00992678

Geographic Term:

Middle West -- Fiction.

Genre:

Thrillers (Fiction)

Document ID:

SD_ILS:2236082

Holds: Copies:

Available:*

Library	Collection	Collection	Call Number	Status
Searching... Beale Memorial Library (Kern Co.)	Searching... Unknown	Large Print Fiction	LP FIC MITCHARD JAC	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Hanford Branch Library (Kings Co.)	Searching... Unknown	Large Print Fiction Area	FIC MITCHARD	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Lemoore Branch Library (Kings Co.)	Searching... Unknown	Large Print Fiction Area	FIC MITCHARD	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Madera County Library (Madera Co.)	Searching... Unknown	Large Print Shelves	MITCHARD	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Merced Main Library (Merced Co.)	Searching... Unknown	Large Print	LP MIT	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Shaver Lake Branch (Fresno Co.)	Searching... Unknown	Large Print Book Area	MITCHAR JA Two_if	Searching... Unknown

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Summary

Just hours after his wife and her entire family perish in the Christmas Eve tsunami in Brisbane, American expat and former police officer Frank Mercy goes out to join his volunteer rescue unit and pulls a little boy from a submerged car, saving the child's life with only seconds to spare. Not quite knowing why, Frank sidesteps the law, when, instead of turning Ian over to the Red Cross, he takes the boy home to the Midwestern farm where he grew up. Not long into their journey, Frank begins to believe that Ian has an extraordinary, impossible telepathic gift; but his only wish is to protect the deeply frightened child. As Frank struggles to start over, training horses as his father and grandfather did before him, he meets Claudia, a champion equestrian and someone with whom he can share his life -- and his fears for Ian. Both of them know that it will be impossible to keep Ian's gift a secret forever.

Reviews (4)

Publisher's Weekly Review

Mitchard's (The Deep End of the Ocean) latest combines elements of science fiction and suspense with a heartfelt meditation on family and grief, to mixed results. When a tsunami devastates the Australian coast, Frank Mercy loses his pregnant wife and her entire extended family in the span of a few moments. Bottling up his grief, he reports for duty as a first responder and pulls a three-year-old boy named Ian from a half-submerged van. Frank feels strangely compelled to take him under his wing, and the pair flee Brisbane for Frank's family's horse farm in Wisconsin. It's soon apparent that Ian is special: he can speak to animals in a way that calms even the most skittish horses, and he can convince people to do whatever he wants (which, since he's three, generally means buying him sweets and toys). As Frank and Ian's bond becomes stronger, both begin to heal, but just as they become comfortable, figures from Ian's past catch up to him, and his mysterious origins become clearer, as does the danger he's in. Mitchard's usual strong characters and emotionally resonant prose are evident here, but a few predictable twists and a shoehorned-in love interest drag things down. This won't grab new readers, and longtime fans may feel frustrated by the change of style and pace. Agent: Jane Gelfman, Gelfman Schneider. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Kirkus Review

After losing his wife and unborn son in a tsunami in Australia, an expat horse trainer adopts a psychic 3-year-old. As Mitchard's (Second Nature: A Love Story, 2011, etc.) latest novel opens, a killer wave hits Brisbane. Among the victims are ex-cop Frank Mercy's pregnant wife and almost her entire extended family. Dazed and grief-stricken, Frank joins the volunteer rescue efforts the next day, coming to the aid of a woman and two small boys in a van that is half underwater. He plucks out the littler child, but before he can get to the others, the vehicle is swept away. When the devastated Frank returns to his family's horse farm in Wisconsin a few weeks later, he takes the components of an unexpected new life: the boy (whom he has not bothered to legally adopt), a huge horse named Glory Bee, and a young Irish groom. By this time he's learned that the boy he named Ian, who rarely speaks, has a telepathic gifthe can enter the minds of enraged people and make them calm down and be nice. Animals, too, as Frank sees when they descend into the cargo hold of their international flight, where Glory Bee and other zoo and domestic animals are going wild from the turbulent ride. "The boy had to jump back after the first time he touched Glory Bee's leg through thewooden slats of the makeshift stall.She was roaring, cantering in place. But the second time Ian touched her, she stopped, and if she were a woman, Frank believed he would have seen her stand there, sobbing." Frank recognizes the possibility that Ian's power could easily be used for eviland soon enough, it becomes clear that very bad people are hunting him down, murdering those who get in their way. Meanwhile, Frank meets another woman, an equestrian psychiatrist who asks him to train her and her horse for the Olympics. As his heart begins to heal, he faces the challenge of protecting Ian from the mounting threat. A troubled protagonist, beset by disaster and malefaction, is touched by magic as he develops new emotional connections. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Booklist Review

The author of The Deep End of the Ocean (1996) returns with a gripping new family drama. Former police officer Frank Mercy becomes a widowerin Australia after a devastating tsunami wreaks havoc on Brisbane. Shell-shocked at the loss of his wife and unborn child, Frank joins the rescue effort and saves a three-year-old boy from a van just before the boy's brother and caretaker are swept away in the flooding. Frank immediately bonds with the mute child, whom he starts to call Ian, and impulsively decides not to turn him in to aid workers. Instead, Frank has a friend forge papers for Ian and takes him back to his family farm in Wisconsin, unable to shake the feeling that Ian is in danger somehow. When Ian finally begins to speak, Frank discovers he has an extraordinary ability. Frank's instincts are proven correct when he discovers a mysterious group of criminals have followed him from Australia, intent on taking Ian. Mitchard deftly weaves together domestic drama with taut suspense as she builds to a heart-stopping climax. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Best-selling Mitchard explores new territory in this unusual and suspenseful tale, which will be heralded by a many-platformed marketing and promotional campaign.--Huntley, Kristine Copyright 2015 Booklist

Library Journal Review

After Frank Mercy loses his wife in a tsunami in Australia, he rescues a small child from a car adrift in the floodwaters. In the absence of a family member to claim the boy-Ian-Frank keeps him. Together, they return to Frank's horse farm in the United States. Slowly, Frank realizes Ian has a special gift, and their increasing bond helps Frank heal from the loss of his wife. To complicate matters, a series of shadowy and dangerous people have followed Ian from Australia, intent on using his gift for their own gain. Frank must decide to what lengths he will go to protect Ian from harm. Verdict A slow start and overwrought prose in the first third of the novel give way to a genuinely moving story about the ties that bind families. Frank and Ian are carefully drawn characters, while the bad guys remain unsatisfactorily unexplained until the end. Mitchard (The Deep End of the Ocean) combines elements of suspense and the supernatural into a story both epic and intimate. Mitchard fans, as well as those of Jodi Picoult and Anita Shreve, will appreciate this affecting family drama. [See Prepub Alert, 9/28/15.]-Sarah Cohn, Manhattan Coll. Lib., Bronx, NY © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Excerpts

Two If by Sea ONE SO MANY THINGS happen when people can't sleep. It was always hot in Brisbane, but that night was pouty, unsettling. After getting Natalie and her family comfortable in their rooms at the inn, Frank couldn't rest. His leg plagued him. The toll of oppressive weather on that kind of old injury was no old farmer's myth. He rambled around, briefly joining Natalie's brother Brian in the bar on the beach, then painfully mounting the switchbacked decks of wooden stairs that led to a kind of viewing platform just adjacent to the car park, looking out over Bribie Island Beach. Up there, he hoped the signal would be good enough to call home, his home, if home is the place you started. For Frank, that would always be a ramshackle horse farm in south-central Wisconsin--now probably more ramshackle than when he last saw it, three years before. As the brrrrr on the other end began, his pulse quickened. He looked up at the sky and thought of all the calls darting through the sea of radio waves tonight, swift as swallows--dutiful, hopeful, wistful, sad. "Frank?" His sister, Eden, answered, her voice holiday-bright and holiday-brittle, suddenly next to him across nine thousand miles. He was about to ask her to summon his mother to the phone so they could all talk together when he saw it. Without thinking, and without another word to Edie, he let his phone slip into his jeans pocket. He could not figure out what it was. He would never remember it as a wave. Wave was too mere a word. Although there were hundreds of photos and pieces of film, some shot just at the moment, near this very spot, Frank could look at these and remain curiously unmoved. But should he close his eyes and let himself return, the sick sweats would sweep down his breastbone, a sluice of molten ice. He would hear again the single dog's one mournful howl, and feel the heavy apprehension, something like that moment from his days as a uniform cop when a routine traffic stop went completely to shit and a fist came flying in from nowhere, but monumentally worse. So much worse that it routed even imagination. Many years later, Frank would think, this was his first sight of the thing that would sweep away the center of his life in the minutes after midnight, and, by the time the sun rose, send surging into his arms the seed of his life to come. Just like that. Like some mythical deity with blind eyes that took and gave unquestioned. He saw the wave as a gleaming dam, built of stainless steel, standing upright in the misty moonlight, fifty feet tall and extending for half a mile in either direction. Then, as it collapsed in place, it was water, surging lustily forward and drowning every building on the beach, including the Murry Sand Castle Inn, where Frank's pregnant wife and her entire extended family lay asleep. For one breath, Frank saw the inn, its porch strung with merry lanterns, red and gold and green, and in the next breath, he saw everything disappear, every light go out, faster than it was possible to think the words that could describe it. He shouted, "No!" and stumbled forward to make his way down the high tiers of wooden stairs he had only just ascended. Hoarse, in the distance, another voice called, "No!" over a cascade of sound--the brittle pop of breaking glass, screams peppering the air like gunshot, and the throaty insistence of the water. Even as Frank turned, the mud-colored tide was boiling up the stairs and leaping the boardwalk barricade. He plunged forward, trying to wade against it, to find the riser of the wooden steps, but there was nothing; his foot bounced against water; he was soaked to the thigh. Pulling himself up along the top rail of the fence, for he would certainly be able to see something of the inn from there, or at least hear something, he shouted, "Natalie!" There were no voices. No lights except the milky smear from the hotels and office towers far in the distance to his left, like a frill of fallen stars. No sound except the insistent gossip of the water, and he was wet now to his waist. Grateful that he was still at least relatively young and passably fit, Frank hauled himself over the fence. He skip-sprinted across the car park, to their little Morris Mini-Minor. Water was already frothing around the tires. Frank pulled open the door, throwing himself into the seat, fumbling for his keys, quickly gaining the highway. He stopped again and got out. He heard a man's voice cry, "Help! Who's there . . . ?" and then again the swallowing silence. Floodwater rocked at the verge of the road; now how many feet above sea level? Of the two of them, Natalie was, pound for pound, by far the stronger, fitter, even tougher. Of the two of them, she was also the more intrepid, the more likely to have found some way to outsmart and elude this cliff of tides. They would find each other, and he did her no service by stalling here, forsaking his own life for no purpose. Natalie would have hated him for that. He floored it, racing inland. Miles sloughed away and he felt rather than saw the dark shapes of other cars congealing around him. At last, there was nowhere to move, and all the cars had to stop and Frank got out and walked. Others walked, too. An old man struggled under the weight of a gray-lipped girl. She was perhaps ten or eleven years old and her sweet, lifeless face had closed in a smile, her nose and eyes pouring saltwater tears. Frank saw a young woman wearing just one shoe. She clutched a bundle of wet clothes, among them a child's small jersey embroidered with cross-stitched Santas. A man Frank's own age sat sobbing near a great blooming evergreen frangipani. Frank avoided their eyes. He thought he might be able to get to a place where he could think, but he only walked farther. He met people hiking toward him, or saw them sitting in their cars, or standing still by the roadside, their hands like the pendulums of broken clocks. After some time, he came upon a large group gathered around a car whose young driver had removed his outsized speakers from the dash. A basso radio voice intoned, "Now you will hear that the tsunami happened because of climate change, friends. You will hear that it struck our coast because of a tropical storm deep in the Pacific. You will hear that this was a random event. But do you believe that? How can any man believe that it was coincidence that water swept into the Sodom of Brisbane on this very hallowed night? Intelligent people will say that we have failed to take care of our earth. But the Lord God Almighty does not care about the climate. He cares about the climate of our souls! As it says in Matthew, 'Therefore keep watch, because you do not know the day or the hour.' And so it has come . . ." Frank walked around a curve in the road, and the preacher's voice faded to a series of thumps, like the bass notes of a song from a car passing the open window of Frank's childhood bedroom on the farm. A pale vein of light lolled on the horizon. It would soon be dawn, on Christmas morning. Excerpted from Two If by Sea: A Novel by Jacquelyn Mitchard All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.