Magee, Doug: Never Wave Goodbye

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Never Wave Goodbye sets up a nightmarish scenario: Lena Trainor puts her nine-year-old daughter Sarah on a bus bound for sleep-away camp, the girl's first time away from home. Lena is pleased with the farewell. There was no trauma, no dramatics. But half an hour later the camp bus pulls into the driveway to pick up Sarah. The first bus wasn't from the camp.

Sarah is one of four kids who are abducted that morning. The book follows what happens to them and also the efforts of the police and their parents to find them. But the book's focus is on Lena--on her self doubt, her reaction to the press, her relationship with her husband, and her connection to her daughter.

Magee's hook is great. It plays into every parent's fear that their children might one day be stolen from them. The book should be a nail-biter, but somehow it never quite gets there--perhaps because we always know what's happening with the kids, and it's never particularly scary. Beyond its general ho-hummedness, there were some things about the story that bothered me. The kids were for the most part annoyingly helpless. Granted, they're only nine, but still I found myself wishing they would do something smart for once. At nine, too, a couple of them had Facebook accounts--which doesn't jibe with my experience of the online lives of that age group--yet didn't know their parents' email addresses. (This last doesn't surprise me, but it doesn't fit with their comfort using Facebook.) There wasn't much point to the involvement of Lena's father in the story, and there was no point at all that I could see to Lena's occasional visions involving her grandmother. The subplot about her husband's affair peters out into irrelevance, and the mystical nonsense at the end of the book was irritating.

All of the above makes it sound like I hated the book. I didn't. But given how great the hook was, I was expecting more.

Comments

[Mystica]

1.

I have read so many reviews of this book and they have all been very positive. One of those which have to be read. Thanks for this post.