Ponder: The Child Finder

The Child Finder ©2017 by Rene Denfeld is an engaging tale about Naomi, a trained investigator, who has a honed talent enabling her to specialize in locating lost children. The child may have wandered off, been abandoned, gotten lost, or been abducted, but Naomi has a high success rate for finding children. She is not a psychic. Highly respected by the police, she uses records, logic, interviewing, sharp people skills, out-of-the-box thinking, street smarts – and yes, intuition – to follow a faint trail, sometimes even years old, to the child. The child may not always be alive when found, but at least there is an answer a large percentage of the time. This was a five star read for me. 

  

Naomi herself grew up in a loving foster home and has no memory of her own family prior to her placement there. She grows very close with Jerome, a boy her own age who is also placed there under the care of a kind, gentle, wise widow named Mrs. Mary Cottle. When Naomi becomes of age she sets out on her own, trains as an investigator, learns survival and self-defense fighting skills, and earns a reputation for herself as being adept at finding lost children. The novel focuses on her as an adult in her late twenties; her childhood in foster care is presented more as background information. It is intimated that perhaps Naomi is so driven in her chosen career because subconsciously she yearns for knowledge of her own beginnings. 

In The Child Finder Naomi is concentrating on finding eight-year-old Madison, having been hired by desperate parents not willing to give up the search for their daughter even though she has been missing for three years. The family had gone on an outing to cut down their Christmas tree in the snowy woods the year she was in kindergarten and when they turned around Madison was missing. Had she wandered off and become lost? Had she been abducted? Unclear. Unknown. Tragic either way. Searches immediate after the event did not find her and were eventually abandoned. 

The setting of this book drew me in. Snowy forests in mountainous terrain are populated with wildlife and sparsely settled by trappers who lived off the land. Naomi is equally comfortable in nature or in the buildings of libraries and offices of public archives – tracking in the woods or tracking paper trails with determination and dogged attention to detail. The narration of this book alternates voice between that of Naomi and that of a young girl in a cabin in the woods. Could that young girl be Madison? Whether she is or not will Naomi find her?

After reading and immensely enjoying this book I looked up a biography of the author Rene Denfeld. Above and beyond her other social justice involvements, she herself has spent twenty years as a foster parent and has adopted three foster children as her own.  Her literary accolades are many:

• Winner of a prestigious French Prix award
• Long list for 2015 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction
• IMPAC list International Dublin Literary Award
• A New York Times Hero of the Year for her justice work
• Recipient of the National Break The Silence Award
• #1 Book of the Year, the Oregonian
• Finalist for the 2014 Flaherty First Novel Prize
• Top #5 Books of the Year, Powell’s Books
• Indie Next Picks
• ALA Excellence in Fiction Award listing
• Foyles Best of 2014
• Harper Collins Canada #1 Fan Choice
• Waterstones Book Club Pick

I could not put this book down. It had warmth; it had mystery; it had drama and tense scenes; it had clues and inventive approaches that engaged me. Its climax and ending did not disappoint and yet left me wanting more. The Child Finder did not depend on romance or sex to sustain interest, although it did contain many deep human interactions. There was one very tender exchange I am likely to recall.

"Are you trying to talk your way into my bed?" she asked, her voice thick with emotion.
"No." His voice sounded warm. "I'm trying to talk my way into your heart."

Once I'd finished, I had raved about it enough my husband picked it up and he read it, also enjoying it. I liked it so much I immediately ordered a followup book by the same author, The Butterfly Girl; however that book is the subject of my next post. The Child Finder. ★★★★★ Great! Read it!