The Child Finder

The home was a small yellow cottage on an empty street. There was something dispirited about it, but Naomi was used to that. The young mother who answered the door was petite and looked much older than her age. Her face seemed strained and tired.

“The child finder,” she said.

When I read The Enchanted by Rene Denfield, I thought that it was one of the most special books I had ever come across: from the story to the sentences, it suited my tastes completely. So it was with a lot of excitement that I learned of Denfield's second release, and I was so happy when I tracked down a copy of it. And now that I've read The Child Finder, it's hard to tell if my lingering disappointment is simply the deflation of too high expectations. Don't get me wrong: this is a fine book, but it lacks whatever made The Enchanted so special. 

Everyone needs faith: faith that even though the world is full of evil, a suitor will come and kiss us awake; faith that the girl will escape the tower, the big bad wolf will die, and even those poisoned by malevolence can be reborn, as innocent as purity itself.

In a nutshell: Naomi is a private investigator who specialises in searching for missing children. As the book begins, she is meeting with the parents of a little girl, Madison, who vanished in the woods three years earlier; and while Naomi doesn't share the mother's faith that Madison will be found alive after all this time, she understands that even tracking down the girl's remains will bring closure. We soon learn that Noami herself had been a missing child – her first memory is escaping something when she was around nine (having blocked out whatever came before) – and while she has trouble getting close to people, Naomi is bonded to the foster mother who took her in and the foster brother she acquired there.

In deep, dark caves the world is made, one step at a time. You touch a root and think of yourself as a branch. You taste mud, and from this your own organs grow. You can finally be still, restful, knowing the world is a story and that soon yours will end.

We also learn right away that Madison is alive and she is keeping herself sane by imagining herself a not-quite-human character in a fairy tale. The story alternates between Naomi's point-of-view and her efforts in the present and Madison's experiences over the three years she's been gone; inevitably building to the point where their stories will cross. Naturally, a narrative about searching for a missing child is inherently tense, and Denfield uses literary devices and provides behavioural insights that elevate The Child Finder above other books I've read about missing – gone – girls. It's a fine read, if not quite full of surprises.

He saw Naomi as the wind traveling over the field, always searching, never stopping, and never knowing that true peace is when you curl around one little piece of something. One little fern. One little frond. One person to love.

I found Naomi's backstory and personal life to be unnecessarily complicated – okay, the child finder is searching for herself in every case she takes, but did every man she meet need to fall for her? – and here's my biggest take away: If network television decided to make a primetime drama and call it “The Child Finder”, this book would serve well as the script for its pilot. And I've always thought that if a book's essence could be contained within a one hour episode of Law and Order/CSI/Criminal Minds, then it's not quite literature.

Even so, Denfield uses The Child Finder to share some of her unique knowledge: She is a foster mother herself and weaves in a thread about fostering; she is a death row investigator and attempts to illuminate how monsters can be created; she has seen how the mind cracks under pressure and uses Madison to show how a person might best cope. All of this, plus a melodic writing style, should add up to something more, but somehow, it doesn't; and I wanted the more. And, again, I'm probably just disappointed because I've had the more from Denfield before.