In the years since, she had discovered the sacrament of life did not demand memory.

There are two driving narratives in this book and at least initially I wasn’t clear if they were slowly merging together or slowly diverging apart. That could be for two very different reasons, but the novel, which I listened to as opposed to read, was perfectly fine, but only perfectly fine, so I didn’t feel like going back and investigating. So the two narratives are: one, Naomi Cottle, the titular “child finder,” is beginning a new case, and we are made to realize this is far from her first one. A child finder, according to the novel, is a specific kind of investigator who finds children, and as you can imagine this doesn’t always mean alive, and sometimes, they don’t get found. But she has her successes and setbacks. This particular case is a missing girl, lost when she was five, who has been missing for about three years, having disappeared into the woods during a family outing. Naomi is being hired by the family to pick up the cold case. The other storyline is “the Snow Girl” and I don’t remember if her identity is mentioned very early on or if she’s repeatedly referred to as the snow girl, up until the moment she isn’t. In any event, I couldn’t tell for the longest time if we were getting the missing girl’s perspective or flashing back to Naomi’s own background, which also involves having been kidnapped at some point.

Regardless, this book felt relatively empty to me. The writing was perfectly fine, but the book was pretty bare and in the ways that could have been interesting, it felt lacking for me.

(Photo: https://www.amazon.com/Child-Finder-Novel-Rene-Denfeld/dp/0062659057/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1546899391&sr=8-1&keywords=the+child+finder)