Naomi
devotes her life to finding missing children.
Her latest case involves Madison Culver who went missing three years
earlier. Naomi’s search is focused on
the Skookum National Forest in Oregon where 5-year-old Madison wandered away
from her family during a Christmas tree hunt.
Naomi is not just searching for a lost girl; she is also looking for her
past. She herself was an abducted child
though she has no memories from before her escape.
There is
not much suspense because we are given Madison’s point of view. She is being held by a man whom she just
calls Mr. B. She reinvents herself as
the Snow Girl from a favourite fairy tale.
When Naomi thinks about abducted children, she reflects that “the ones
who did the best in the long run made a safe place inside their very own
minds. Sometimes they even pretended
they were someone else. Naomi didn’t
believe in resilience. She believed in
imagination.” It does not take a genius
to figure out Madison’s fate. It is also
very obvious who Mr. B actually is.
There is a final scene where danger is used to create suspense, but,
again, the outcome is predictable.
The author
can be commended for not treating child victimization and abuse as
entertainment. References to Madison’s
treatment are indirect; there is no graphic, gratuitous violence. Instead, we have oblique but telling
statements: “Mr. B’s hands were gentle –
when he was setting the traps” and “He was wise and kind when he wasn’t angry
with her.” Denfeld also manages to show
compassion for Mr. B. As details of his
past are revealed, the reader cannot but feel some sympathy and understanding
for a damaged person. Mr. B is not to be
seen as totally evil: “Madison didn’t
understand that people can be good and bad. . . . She didn’t know that when you
have that kind of bad inside you, it is not like your goodness is hiding it. It is more like the badness and the goodness
are all mixed together.”
I did not
find Naomi a character with whom I could connect though her tenacity is
admirable. She is relentless in her
investigations, but her obsession means that she has few friends and remains
distant with her foster family. She
doesn’t even spend time with her foster mother when she is dying; Naomi just
leaves her foster brother to look after the woman who adopted her! She is even warned, “’We all need a sense of
purpose . . . Be careful the purpose doesn’t destroy you.’” Naomi is close to very few people, but all
three men in her life fall in love with her?!
There are
touches of sentimentality that detract from the quality of the writing. One of Naomi’s male admirers feels rejected
“But he wasn’t about to give up. His
heart told him so.” There are statements
like, “Her entire life she had been running from terrifying shadows she could
no longer see – and in escape she ran straight into life. ” And Naomi is seen as “the wind traveling over
the field, always searching, never stopping, and never knowing that true piece
is when you curl around one little piece of something. One little fern. One little frond. One person to love.”
The message
is one of hope. Though we live in a
fragmented world where “People had a way of appearing and disappearing in one
another’s lives” and though “America was an iceberg shattered into a billion
fragments, and on each stood a person, rotating like an ice floe in a storm,”
there is hope because “No matter how far you have run, no matter how long you
have been lost, it is never too late to be found.”
I can’t
believe the number of 5-star reviews this book has received. In my view, it is just average.
No comments:
Post a Comment