The Child Finder (Naomi Cottle, #1) in Around the World in 80 Books

Jun 18, 2018 marianne rated it liked it

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A skilled young private investigator named Naomi is hired by a couple to help them locate their daughter Madison, who vanished three years ago at age 5 in the remote woods and mountains of central Oregon.

Naomi depends as much on her ability to carry out relentless, meticulous research as she does on basic intuition, which for her is rooted in her own traumatic experience of having once been kidnapped and held captive as a young girl. Though she does not remember this part of her past, she is ha A skilled young private investigator named Naomi is hired by a couple to help them locate their daughter Madison, who vanished three years ago at age 5 in the remote woods and mountains of central Oregon.

Naomi depends as much on her ability to carry out relentless, meticulous research as she does on basic intuition, which for her is rooted in her own traumatic experience of having once been kidnapped and held captive as a young girl. Though she does not remember this part of her past, she is haunted by it and cannot allow herself to confront it. This prevents her from getting close to people. In fact, it seems that she has exchanged any sort of examination into her own past for a career devoted to finding lost children. This is noble, but it’s clear that she is ultimately looking for the tortured young girl she used to be, and bless her heart for that.

I think the book strengths are that it visits the voices of all of the main characters in this story; Naomi, Madison, and Madison’s abductor, who (view spoiler)

This was an ambitious book that has many elements to it; magical realism, different points of view, parallels with fairy tales, narrator voices that spanned across three generations, a prolonged chase/hunt, etc. While it addresses an incredibly sensitive topic that evoked strong, visceral reactions in me at some points, it fell short of the task mostly because it was so very slim on nuance. There were far too many hints and clues throughout the book, and I found myself guessing most of the major plot twists well before they were revealed. Some of the characters fit stereotypes too fully for my taste, with little more to them. It makes me think that stereotypical characters really only work in satirical novels. In books that ask to be taken seriously, they bother (and bore) me to no end.

At the end of the story, Naomi instructs Madison to own her story. Never mind that I found it difficult to believe that an eight year old who had not spoken to another soul for three years would make any sense of that phrase. What I found interesting instead was that this was precisely something Naomi had not done herself. Yet. And so I could see Denfeld pen a sequel in which she allows Naomi to discover her past and finally own it. I hope she does. ...more

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Sep 04, 2019 Chantal rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Naomi's earliest memory is of herself as a ten-year-old running naked in a strawberry field. She runs towards migrant workers who take her to a sheriff.

Twenty years later, Naomi is a thirty-year-old private investigator trying to find a child who has disappeared while out on a family trip. Naomi has become a private investigator to atone, as she puts it, to "atone" for her past.

The child she seeks to save, however, has been lost for three years in a remote part of Willamette Valley. There's n ...more

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Nov 28, 2017 Rebekah rated it liked it

Shelves: genre-thriller, genre-mystery, genre-thriller-mystery-thriller, genre-suspense, genre-fiction, nbrc-bom-br, bookgirls

I apparently read this and have literally no memory of it whatsoever

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Oct 22, 2017 Laura marked it as to-watch

Shelves: library, crime-thriller-suspense, first-of-a-series, audible-has, library-request, friend-love, libby, lib-has-audio, toppler-maybe, hoopla-harford

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