CY@CY Says Welcome to my dreamscape. Where a Lim is also a Ling.
Having read Fiona Barton’s 2016 debut The Widow which I find rather over-rated, I started reading her second book The Child with some trepidation, expecting to be disappointed again. The Child has received great reviews like its predecessor.
The Child By Fiona Barton
Like The Widow, The Child is told from the perspectives of a few characters: journalist Kate Waters, a grieving mother named Angela, a younger wife named Emma who is afflicted with terrible anxiety and Emma’s mother Jude. Kate is looking for a story. Angela is looking for closure for her missing daughter. Emma is seeking to come to terms with her past as the daughter of a single mother named Jude.
As an old house is being demolished in a gentrifying district of Southeast London, a construction worker wielding a shovel uncovers the skeleton of a small child. The story doesn’t garner much attention at first, but after tumbling upon the story while reading a rival newspaper, journalist Kate Waters thinks it is a story that deserves attention and begins to look into it.
As Kate investigates, she unearths connections to the case of a new-born baby stolen from the maternity ward in a local hospital decades ago and was never found. She is drawn into the pasts of the people who once lived in the neighbourhood where the skeleton was discovered.
Emma, married to a professor much older than her, sees the story in the paper and becomes extremely agitated. She is concerned her long buried secret could be about to be exposed.
When Emma tells her mother Jude about the ghastly discovery, Jude quickly puts an end to the conversation by saying, “Well, we don’t want to talk about dead babies, do we?”
Angela is the mother who lost her new-born daughter Alice decades ago. When Angela spots the news article about the child skeleton, she is convinced the skeleton is that of her missing daughter.
The Child is a suspenseful psychological thriller with an ending that I didn’t see coming and it kept me guessing right to the end. I find it engrossing with an emotionally satisfying conclusion. Fiona Barton has outdone herself with this book.