Top positive review
5.0 out of 5 starsBeautifully Written, Compelling, and Ultimately Joyful
Reviewed in the United States on December 5, 2017
This is a beautifully written and pretty wonderful novel. The two major characters, one a twenty-something and the other an eight year old, are or have been victims of sexual predators. In very different ways both find the inner strength to survive and to retain an inner core of self. The elder is now a "child finder" while the younger is a taken child. This book is far more a celebration of those who survive than it is an elegy for those who don't.
The child finder has had quite a success rate in the searches for missing, presumably taken, children she has undertaken; and, as a result, she has a growing list of pleading requests from distraught parents begging for her help. She is more successful than law enforcement because of her empathy for the child, the dedication she brings to the search--devoting month after month to the single task-- and her ability (pardon the cliche) to think outside the box. This book is not critical of law enforcement. The example we are given is entirely admirable. But how often is law enforcement allowed to concentrate month after month on a single case? But she will. The book mentions one of her previous successes, the finding of a boy who had been missing for eight years. Only she, of all the law enforcement who have looked for the child, thinks to consult the original blueprints of the school where he was last seen. This is pretty much a definition of thinking outside the box. In the current case she alone among searchers finds the original land grants in the neighborhood of where the child disappears, and she along searches out each of those old, original sites for a place in which a child could be hidden. An earlier reviewer suggested that she had some unexplained arcane ability that explained her success. I disagree; it is an unending patience and a willingness to keep on keeping on which explain her success.
This book obviously tackles very ugly topics--pedophilia and its victims, the victim who grows into a predator himself because he has simply never learned any other way of acting--but it does so with tact; there are no brutal and sickening scenes of child rape here. This is an author who believes her readers know what happens when a sexual predator takes a child. But above all, this is a story of those who survive; and the reader can share in the enormous accomplishment, especially considering the magnitude of what they have survived.
One thought I'd like to add: A previous reviewer found the book poorly written. I disagree entirely. The two examples that person quotes are thoughts taken from a person's mind. I think that very few people monitor their thoughts for grammatical accuracy, and I found both examples utterly realistic in term of what a person in that situation might think.
Be that as it may, I thought this a very fine book that I'd recommend to adults without hesitation.