TUESDAY SPARKS: EXCERPTING “TWO IF BY SEA”

Welcome to another Tuesday celebrating bookish events, from Tuesday/First Chapter/Intros, hosted by Bibliophile by the Sea; and Teaser Tuesdays hosted by Books & a Beat.

Today’s feature is a book I hope to start reading soon:  Two If By Sea, by Jacquelyn Mitchard, an epic story of courage and devotion that spans three continents and the entire map of the human heart.

 

 

 

 

Intro:  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 brrrr 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.

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Teaser:  That was it.  Claudia was tired.  And other hallucinations.  Life was hurling events at the two of them like a pitching machine stuck on fastball.  Claudia was at her limit. (57%).

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Synopsis:  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. In that moment, Frank’s own life is transformed. 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. Already, ominous coincidences have put Frank’s police instincts on high alert, as strangers trespass the quiet life at the family farm.

The fight to keep Ian safe from a sinister group who want him back takes readers from the ravaged shores of Brisbane to the middle of America to a quaint English village. Even as Frank and Claudia dare to hope for new love, it becomes clear that they can never let Ian go, no matter what the cost. A suspenseful novel on a grand scale, Two If by Sea is about the best and worst in people, and the possibility of heroism and even magic in ordinary life.

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What do you think?  Read more?  I know that I’m eager to keep going.

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