Three years ago, Madison Culver disappeared when her family was choosing a Christmas tree in Oregon’s Skookum National Forest. She would be eight-years-old now—if she has survived. Desperate to find their beloved daughter, certain someone took her, the Culvers turn to Naomi, a private investigator with an uncanny talent for locating the lost and missing. Known to the police and a select group of parents as "the Child Finder," Naomi is their last hope.
Naomi’s methodical search takes her deep into the icy, mysterious forest in the Pacific Northwest, and into her own fragmented past. She understands children like Madison because once upon a time, she was a lost girl, too.
As Naomi relentlessly pursues and slowly uncovers the truth behind Madison’s disappearance, shards of a dark dream pierce the defenses that have protected her, reminding her of a terrible loss she feels but cannot remember. If she finds Madison, will Naomi ultimately unlock the secrets of her own life?
Told in the alternating voices of Naomi and a deeply imaginative child, The Child Finder is a breathtaking, exquisitely rendered literary page-turner about redemption, the line between reality and memories and dreams, and the human capacity to survive.
4.5 Stars
"No matter how far you have run, no matter how long you have been lost, it is never too late to be found."
The only way to describe this book is that it is haunting. And not in a scary ghost-story kind of way. No, The Child Finder is haunting in that it shows the very real horrors that children face in this world - when they are not protected, when an outside force turns their world upside down in the worst way imaginable. Yet even with the horrors of everyday life, Denfeld manages to spin this story almost like a fairy-tale. I was utterly spellbound.
The Child Finder is about a private investigator, Naomi, who specializes in finding lost children. She has demons of her own, and maybe she throws herself into her work so thoroughly in order to avoid her past, but it cannot be denied that she is good at what she does. She has to be careful, to not let all this bad in the world poison her own soul. Sometimes a child is never found, and sometimes what has happened to them is utterly unbearable, but Naomi continues to search for these lost children in a way that others are unable to, drawing from her own fractured experience to help guide her.
Our missing child in this novel is a girl named Madison, who gets lost searching for the perfect Christmas tree with her family three years prior. Madison becomes Snow Girl in order to survive, and I think Denfeld handles this with perfect grace. She captures the mind of a child trying to survive in an unimaginable situation in the only way she knows how: protecting her mind from her past life, and recreating herself into someone new. It is heartbreaking to read Madison's scenes, remembering that she is only a child, but I am in awe of her resilience. I raced through this book, because I needed to know how Madison's story ended.
One thing, I figured out the 'twist' in the story fairly early on. But this didn't stop me from reading. While I knew who-dun-it, I needed to know how everything played out. Would Naomi find Madison? Would Madison still be of sound mind if/when she did? I wanted so badly for everything to be okay in the end, but life rarely is. The hope, though, that things will turn out alright, and the need for an innocent child to be saved, spurred on my reading and kept me up late into the night.
The Child Finder is a heavy book - lost children, abducted children, kids being abused and forced to do unspeakable things ... there were a lot of moments I had to pause my reading to take a breath, the pain from what these lost kids were going through unbearable. But what Denfeld does so excellently is that she never loses hope. It may be small, and it may be faint, but every lost soul always has a chance to be found.
*This is the first book in a series. The sequel, titled The Butterfly Girl, returns to Naomi's life and her search for another missing child with links to her own past.
About the Author
Rene Denfeld is the bestselling author of THE CHILD FINDER, THE ENCHANTED and the THE BUTTERFLY GIRL, which Margaret Atwood raved on twitter is "a heartbreaking, finger-gnawing, yet ultimately hopeful novel."
Rene's poetic fiction has won numerous awards including the French Prix, an ALA Medal for Excellence and an IMPAC listing. Rene works as an investigator, including exonerating innocents from prison and helping sex trafficking victims. Rene has also been a foster parent for 20 years, and is the happy mother to several children adopted from foster care. In 2017 she was awarded the Break The Silence Award for her advocacy work, and the New York Times named her hero of the year.