The Child Finder

Denfeld writes with the all sun-dappled optimism of fairy tales, and much like her debut The Enchanted, it can quickly put you in it's thrall. But it's disconcerting given the story's subject matter.

We're following 5 year old Madison Culver who disappeared in the snow-covered woods of the Skookum National Forest while looking for the perfect Christmas tree with her parents. That was 3 years ago.

Plucked from the snow, near death, she has been nursed back to health in a dug out cellar locked underneath the floorboards of a cabin deep in the woods, tended by a mute bear of a man. Madison escapes into fairy tale to reconcile the horrible new reality she finds herself in.

Madison dreams of the sky, nurtures hope, and even experiences moments of quiet joy - fiercely holding onto the story book fables she's been told.

Meanwhile Naomi Cottle, the Child Finder is working to find Madison. Gifted with the singular ability to find missing children - perhaps in part because she was once one of them. She remembers running naked across a strawberry field at night, escaping from someone or something. Nothing before that moment exists for her. The Child Finder is also the story of how Naomi wrestles with who that child was she left behind on the strawberry field.

It's beautifully done but becomes almost unbearably difficult near the middle. The story becomes loose and baggy and I have a hard time reading about Madison and her captor despite the language. It misses the opportunity to be a taut thriller, squanders some forward momentum with a tangental case Naomi takes on, but nonetheless pulls it together in the end.

Given that Rene Denfeld is the victim of molestation and abuse, that she has worked with sex trafficking victims, and is currently raising three foster children who have suffered their own distinct traumas, the story she's looking to tell is far different and more personally invested than the story I as a casual reader am expecting. Denfeld is invested in redeeming victims, pointing to the possibility of a future and the promise of something better. How could I begrudge that.