Alex's Birthday Sheltered in Place

After reading my daughter-in-law's blog post about four quarantined birthday celebrations at her house (there were three in April and one in early May) I realized I had not posted about my son Alex's birthday this year when he turned 34 on May 26. On his birthday, my husband Frank and I drove up to his St. Denis home in San Ramon which has been closed to comings or goings of the clients and any visitors since mid-March.

We have been FaceTiming Alex since mid-April and were pleased to learn he grasps the concept and enjoys it. He recognizes Frank and me and has touched us on the screen. This photo makes me think of "E.T. phone home".

Since then he has expanded his communications to include his sister Robin from Oklahoma and to his brother Dan from SoCal. Alex's niece and nephew in Oklahoma have even entertained him by singing and dancing for him during the FaceTime call. He has shown off for them by demonstrating how quickly he can assemble a puzzle or by singing "Row, row, row, your boat... merrily, merrily, merrily merrily".

But I digress. On his actual birthday Frank and I went a bit beyond a FaceTime call. We drove to his home, parked in front, and walked around to the rear window looking out on the backyard from off the living room.  A table was set up facing out and his friends gathered round. We, staff, and his housemates sang Happy Birthday to him and he blew out his candle. He liked that so much, they relit the candle twice more and he got to blow it out again and again with a big smile on his face.

Then Frank and I high-fived him, COVID-19 style. It was a short visit but it was fun for him and us.

Ponder: The Pied Piper

The Pied Piper ©1999 by Ridley Pearson is a kidnapping crime thriller featuring Lieutenant Lou Boldt and Dr. Daphne Matthews of the Seattle Police Department. The book is so titled because a serial kidnapper leaves behind a toy flute as his signature of having taken a child. This echoes the tale of the legendary Pied Piper of Hamelin who was hired to rid the town of rats. He successfully lured the rodents to drown in the river by playing his flute, but the townspeople denied him payment. As revenge, he used his music to lead the children of the town to a similar fate. Look closely at the copper-colored body of the flute in the cover artwork by George Cornell of the paperback version I read. It is subtle but there is the reflection of a man holding a little girl, which I found appropriate for this story. 

 

The front image was indeed intriguing but still, had not a good friend of mine recommended this book, I may very well have passed it by. It was a mere 495 pages long and printed in itty-bitty 9 point font on yellowed newsprint weight pages. I dubiously began to read it, telling myself if I really got into it and it was too tiny to focus, I could re-buy it in kindle form.  But I was quickly hooked and, so thoroughly so, that I became oblivious to the poor visual quality. Short chapters were also a plus in encouraging me to read "just one more" before taking a break. 

As this novel opens, the modern day kidnapper steals a ninth child in Seattle, Washington. The anguish of the bereft parents is conveyed so artfully and poignantly I became invested in their fate and that of their beloved stolen four-month old little girl. Since previous kidnappings occurred in other states, the FBI become involved as well as the SPD, Seattle Police Department. There are a large number of character names to remember in the opening chapters of the book (from FBI and SPD both) which was a bit disconcerting, but I forged ahead, refusing to get discouraged. I have since learned that apparently Ridley Pearson is a very prolific writer and this is his fifth book with the main character team of Lou Boldt and Daphne Matthews. Followers of this author would already know this pair and would need to come up to speed only with the FBI contingent. The setting for large portions of this book is Seattle, Washington. Since I visited there  recently as a tourist, many of the places were familiar and lent themselves to my further enjoyment of the novel.

I liked the characters and the fact that the book also includes their back story. When I would watch crime shows on TV, the back story was as interesting to me, or even more so, than the crime being solved; e.g., the relationship between Rick Castle and Kate Beckett on Castle or the relationship between Clark Kent and Lois Lane in Superman. Lou Boldt has recently been promoted from the investigative division to the intelligence division. The intelligence division looks at the evidence and, in concert with profilers, draws crime theories while the investigative section does the footwork to support or refute these connections by gathering more data for correlation. Boldt is a very sharp detective, highly respected, but self-effacing. He himself has two young children and his wife is undergoing chemotherapy for cancer. His wife Elizabeth is understanding and supportive of his work in spite of her illness. Daphne Matthews is a smart, attractive woman, very skilled at her job as a psychologist and profiler, who is a close friend of Lou Boldt .

The intricacies of the plot and clever mechanisms by which the police gather information are the key elements that make this novel a worthy read. How do you find who the targeted families for the next kidnapping might be? How do you find where a vacant home might be for covert operations? How do you avoid being followed? How do you lose a "tail". How do you encourage rather than eschew obfuscation? How do you uncover a potential mole? How many more children will be kidnapped before the perpetrator is apprehended? If you are curious, then read The Pied Piper. 

I rate it four stars which equates to Really good; maybe only one weak aspect or limited audience. The audience might be "limited" to those interested in crime thrillers. Crime thrillers are not a large percentage of my book choices, so it is to The Pied Piper's credit that it was good enough in its genre to grab and hold my interest. Nearly two thirds of Amazon reviewers gave this book 5 stars. Ridley Pearson is well renown in his writing genre so if you are going to read a crime thriller, you might as well read one of the best. Oh, and, as a cute touch, the chapter dividers are teeny silhouettes of a baby buggy.

Ponder: The Butterfly Girl

The Butterfly Girl by Rene Denfeld ©2019 is a sequel to The Child Finder, reviewed and given five stars in my previous post dated 6/5/20 . The Butterfly Girl is equally well written but I did not like it quite as much as The Child Finder. The setting is an urban one in the depraved parts of a city and does not have the beauty of nature or the excuse of animal instincts to cushion the harshness of heinous crimes. In this novel, Naomi reprises her role as an expert in finding children but, in this situation, the child she sets out to find is the one lost in her own memories from her pre-foster childhood days. 

Several of the characters in The Butterfly Girl are homeless children, living on the streets as a preferable alternative to a more distasteful situation in their source home be it due to physical or sexual abuse or due to bodily or emotional neglect. These children are lost in an entirely different interpretation of the word. Celia is one of these children; she has taken to sleeping under a freeway underpass and feeds herself by foraging for food from trash or begging money to eat. Her method of mental escapism is to imagine herself covered in beautiful butterflies, invisible and impervious to harmful acts, hence the title of the novel. Parallel to the Celia story is an ongoing murdering spree where bodies of young girls are found in the river. An undercurrent of fear runs throughout the book that Celia is at risk of becoming one of the corpses.

So far my description does not at all paint a very pretty picture to imagine nor an enticing experience to read! So why did I read this? To be truthful, I did not realize it would be so stark. But even if I'd had an inkling of the extent of the depressing plight it shows of the homeless children, I would have read it anyway. The precursor book The Child Finder left a big question open as to the beginning years of Naomi's life and how it drives her to pursue her chosen profession. It also left me curious as to how Naomi's life and relationship with her foster brother Jerome would morph and develop. I am glad I read The Butterfly Girl since it satisfied both those desires while instilling in me a much greater sympathy and awareness of the plight of those denied the mere basics of a stable home. Our society sometimes dismisses the homeless as being mentally ill or preferring to live the way they do, but can that same rationalization extend to children?

Naomi's zeal in addressing the ignored crimes against these young girls is sufficient to delay her from following her own personal deep-seated agenda. Are those females who must become thieves or prostitutes in order to survive not worthy of protection and do their lives not matter? Why had solving these crimes not been pursued before? Do people really care so little that they can so easily look the other way? These questions sent the lyrics from Blowing in the Wind sung by Peter, Paul, and Mary echoing through my brain.

How many times can a man turn his head and pretend that he just doesn't see?

How realistic is the urban scene Rene Denfeld describes? In reading about this author I learned that she is writing from personal experience. She herself was homeless as a child, choosing to stay on the streets, foraging trash cans for food instead of living under the same roof with her registered sex offender stepfather and his pedophile cohorts. She relays a chilling real-life experience she had when accepting a ride from an ordinary looking man driving a truck in her candid article for CrimeReads titled The Green River Killer and Me. In her own words, Rene Denfeld reveals the epiphany she had.

I suddenly realized my own life had value. This had never occurred to me before. When you are homeless, you stop thinking your life even matters. It’s hard to believe you even exist when so many people look right through you.

This book was an absorbing, well-organized read. Naomi clearly and logically followed clues and achieved justice for victims who have no voice. Her actions and results were inspiring. Though the situation of street children was appalling, I am glad I read this book. I give The Butterfly Girl four stars, translating in my system to mean Really good; maybe only one weak aspect or limited audience. The difficult topic can hamper reading for pleasure; but, the novel does have a feel-good ending. A foster mom herself for twenty or so years, Rene Denfeld describes the adoption of three of her own foster children in a New York Times column called Modern Love. I found her contribution to the August 11, 2017 column titled Four Castaways Make a Family to be an up-lifting supplemental read to The Butterfly Girl.

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!