'Two If By Sea': A lot of drama, perhaps too much

Two If By Sea

By Jacquelyn Mitchard

Simon & Schuster.

416 pp. $25.99 nolead ends

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Reviewed by

Rhonda Dickey

nolead ends There's no shortage of dramatic events in this new novel by Jacquelyn Mitchard, author of The Deep End of the Ocean. It opens with a Christmas Eve tsunami in Brisbane, Australia, that kills Frank Mercy's pregnant wife, Natalie, and nearly all her family.

Frank, a former police officer and expatriate American living in Brisbane, is a volunteer first responder. In the course of rescue work the next day, he's able to pull a small boy out of a flooded van, but not the boy's older brother. The brother pleads, "Take him first. . . . Hurry. He's important."

Frank decides - "entirely against the laws of any country and good sense, and, strangely, his own will" - to take the young boy, whom he names Ian, as his own son. Frank continues a plan already in play in which he and Natalie return to the United States. Only Ian will accompany them. He concocts a cover story for him and coaxes adoption and travel documents from a dubious lawyer. (Just to keep things interesting, Frank also flies his high-strung horse with himself and Ian to the Mercy family's horse farm in Wisconsin.)

Early on, Frank learns that Ian has a preternatural ability to calm and pacify animals and people. It's so remarkable, and so obvious to those who witness it, that they call it "the Ian effect." As his brother said, "He's important."

There's much more - and that's a problem.

Because so much is packed into the plot, Two If By Sea is burdened by a lack of focus that persists well into the novel. It isn't until more than 100 pages in - with a double murder that seems to be the byproduct of a search for Ian - that you get a sense of where the story is headed. The baddies after Ian have a borderline-implausible motivation, but they get the narrative on track.

It doesn't help that you feel you're on the outside looking in at most of these characters. At one point, Mitchard writes that "Frank was going through life in a robotic state." It's a good insight, but it would have been more effective if she'd shown it through Frank's actions. And, except for an occasional tantrum, Ian doesn't seem like a 4-year-old whose entire life has been washed away and who has been whisked away by a stranger to a new continent. Ian's "effect," too, can veer into the implausible: Two If By Sea is a family story, a romance, and a murder mystery. It's hard to fit a boy with supernatural powers into all that.

Two If By Sea has dramas enough for several novels. It would have been more powerful with fewer of them.

Rhonda Dickey is a former Inquirer editor and reporter.