This is another one of those books that I thought about halfway through that I was going to hate. But by the end, I was really impressed with The Deep End of the Ocean. Except in a couple of brief spurts, the story moved very slowly, almost glacially. But it is this very slowness that in the end makes it so true to life.Shortly after it opens a serious crime takes place. A child is abducted. It looks as if this will be a mystery and the main focus will be on solving the mystery. Aside from finding out who did it and why the main things we want to know are whether he is still alive and if he will ever be found.But this book is not primarily about that. It is much more concerned with how the loss affects his family, especially at first, in excruciating long-suffering detail, his mother. Her part of the story nearly drives me crazy because it takes so long before she gets to the point where she can even begin to function minimally again. And, in her own suffering, she virtually ignores her other children and her husband. But, later on, it deals with how it is affecting his father and older brother as well.And then, long years later, the boy is finally found again. His family has moved back to near where his parents grew up, and he is found living only a few blocks from them. His brother has already suspected it for a while, but it is his mother who becomes certain of it first. Then the police are finally able to piece together the whole story of what happened back then and confirm that it is really him. So the mystery is finally solved.But, guess what? It turns out that reuniting the family is not entirely the sweetness and light that they were expecting. The boy, now a healthy pre-teen has been living with this other family for nearly as long as he can remember and considers them his family now. They even require the services of a court to mediate where he will live and when just as if there had been a divorce involved.Finally, everything begins to work itself out, but it is, for everybody, a much longer and more painful process than anybody would expect.