The Child Finder by Rene Denfeld

Of the children she had found, the ones who did best over the long term were the ones who found a way to play. They created fantasy  worlds in which to hide. Some even talked their captors into giving them toys. Escaping into another world was a way for them to disassociate safely, without losing touch with reality—unlike someone like Naomi, who had blanked it all out. Yes, the ones who did the best in the long run made a safe place inside their very own minds. 

Sometimes they even pretended to be someone else.  

Naomi didn’t believe in resilience. She believed in imagination.

So says the lead character and investigator/ child-finder in Rene Denfeld’s superb novel, The Child Finder. Denfeld is a licensed investigator who specializes in death penalty work. Many of you readers will already know of her through her non-fiction writing or her excellent debut novel, The Enchanted, which I reviewed in 2014.

Naomi (the child finder) has, herself, lived under captive conditions, and we readers are introduced to her as she looks for a girl, Madison, a girl who disappeared three years before when she was five years old. I have no intention of laying out much of the story here, since it is a finely woven mystery, and giving away much at all of the plot would be a sure spoiler.

I will tell you that one of Madison’s favorite folk tales is a Russian one of a snow child. Indeed, I just came across the folk tale this year in reading and reviewing Eowyn Ivey’s lovely novel The Snow Child. Madison decides that she, too, was rolled from the snow by her captor.

In this time of great awakening, the snow girl learned much about herself and the world. She learned the world was a lonely place, because when she cried no one came. She learned the world was an uncertain place, because one moment you were one person and the next you landed on your head all goofy and woke up in a dream. She learned the world was a wild place, full of imagination, because that was the only possible explanation for what had happened.

Ms. Denfeld skillfully takes us from the point of view of Naomi and her work to Madison’s, and she is so deft in her weaving together of the two tales that the reader is kept on edge but occasionally hopeful. Hopeful that Naomi will uncover more of her own blocked past via her search, and also that somehow, miraculously, Madison may be found.

Besides great descriptions of the Pacific Northwest and the icy Cascades, Denfeld also shows her tremendous compassion for children and through telling this tale makes evident her own great imagination.

I found this book totally enchanting, and actually read it in a long, single sitting, not something I do very often. It is very difficult to put down.  On the jacket cover for the book, one commentator says, “Rene Denfeld has a gift for shining bright light in dark places.”  Indeed she does, and rather than risking being a spoiler, I’m going to stop now and urge you pick up the book for yourself. It deserves all the praise it has gotten and more.

Women’s Fiction

With women’s Day just behind us, I am focusing my reading this month on women authors. I notice more and more when I peruse big distributors like Amazon that there is now a genre called “Women’s Fiction.” Not so long ago, this same genre might have been called romance novels, and I take both designations as at least faintly negative, alerting readers that this is light fiction, all about squishy love and relationships, unlike the more muscled serious literature produced by men. In fact, if a reader really wants to read about relationships, between men and women, women and women, parents and children, and even our relationships with other animals, I think the category to look to is women’s fiction.

Indeed, when I look back over women authors of the last century or more, I think most could be put in this category. Simone de Beauvoir, Iris Murdoch, Penelope Lively, Doris Lessing, and even Nadine Gordimer write primarily about family and relationships. Yes, Murdoch’s novels are deeply philosophical, and Gordimer’s deeply political, but the stories told are about relationships. Take for example one of Gordimer’s later novels, A Sport of Nature, Lively’s The Photograph, Lesssing’s The Golden Notebook, de Beauvoirs’ The Mandarins; all of these novels are about relationships, and all (as I read them) feminist novels. 

But I want to put in a word or two today for even more popular so-called romance writers like Jojo Moyes, Joan Silber, and Miranda Beverly-Whittemore. Recently, after finally finishing an agonizingly long and gruesome psychological thriller, a reader friend loaned me a stack of library books when I told her I needed to read something more hopeful and optimistic. The stack included Jojo Moyes, The Last Letter From Your Lover, and The Horse Dancer both of which were deeply perceptive about how relationships go wrong, and how they can sometimes be righted, perhaps with just a few moments of real honesty or a real attempt to un-self, in Murdoch’s words, to really attend to the other. The Horse Dancer not only reveals much about how secrets and  hiding of insecurities prevents real understanding between lovers, and between children and parents, it also describes a beautiful relationship between a girl and her horse, and much advice about how we ought to attend to and treat animals in our lives. 

Now I agree that romance novels often become formulaic, with too much talk of six-pack abdomens and hot, smoky sex. And, as in The Last Letter From Your Lover, too much jerking around of the readers, first giving one hope of a breakthrough, a reunion, a happy ending, and then ripping the carpet out from under those hopes, only to begin to build a new anticipation of resolution, a new thread of hope cut off again, and again. Still, the characters in the novels mentioned are believable and fully fleshed out, and the circumstances usually quite plausible. 

Miranda Beverly-Whittemore’s fine novel, Set Me Free not only describes human relationships well and perceptively, it also tells us a lot about racism and the broken promises Native Americans have continually faced. I’m sure some readers would want to insist that Set Me Free is much more than a romance or women’s fiction book, but my point is that many in this poorly defined genre are much more than romances.

I learned long ago that I loved what many critics deride as ‘chick flicks,’ for many of the same reasons I find so-called romance novels important and uplifting. When I look back and recall why I so loved Edith Wharton. Alice Munro, Willa Cather, I discover that it was their acute understanding of relationships that endeared them to me. Would Jane Austin and Emily Bronte (were they writing today) be labeled romance writers? Certainly, relationships between lovers were key part of their works. 

At various times in my reading life I have rejected whole genres of writing: science-fiction, mysteries, only to discover my reasons were superficial and largely unjustified. So-called romance novels are, I suppose, my latest treasure-trove of overlooked or too quickly rejected novels. Jojo Moyes has made me laugh out loud and cry as she describes the sad but often laughable antics of lovers.

I have not learned much from self-help books on how to make relationships work, or how and when to jettison ones that don’t, but novels (especially those by women) have shown me just how deceit tarnishes and/or destroys relationships, just how even moments of real honesty can restart a relationship in trouble. 

I am a reader who loves to read about families, and here, again, I think the place to go is often this slippery genre I’m trying to characterize.

Next week I will return to my usual habit of reviewing a single novel when I review Rene Denfeld’s The Child Finder, another novel primarily about relationships. But today, I am happy to be recommending to you women’s fiction, which is neither soft nor shallow.