A ray of light in the dark
Denfeld draws on her experience as a homeless teen
The Butterfly Girl Rene Denfeld Harper
Rene Denfeld is a former private investigator who has gazed fearlessly into the dark parts of people’s lives, including her own. Her 1997 book Kill the Body, the Head Will Fall drew on her experience as an amateur boxer. Elsewhere, she has written about the man she once thought of as her father, who turned out to be a sexual predator. By the time she was 15, Denfeld was homeless.
Denfeld’s 2014 fiction debut, The Enchanted, is a remarkable novel centred on a death-row prisoner and the female investigator involved in his case. The novel received the American Library Association Medal for Excellence in Fiction and the French Prix award. It also set the stage for Denfeld’s breakout 2017 bestseller, The Child Finder.
That novel introduced readers to Naomi Cottle, a PI who specializes in missing children.
Cottle returns in Denfeld’s latest novel, The Butterfly Girl. This time, she’s in search of her younger sister. As children, Naomi and her sister were abducted and held prisoner for several years. Only Naomi managed to escape. Ever since, she has been haunted by her sister’s fate.
Naomi focuses her search on Portland. There she crosses paths with Celia, an 11-year-old runaway who has fled sexual abuse at the hands of her heroin-addicted mother’s vile partner, Teddy. Like Naomi,
Celia had abandoned her own younger sister when she left home. Celia now takes refuge in a ravine beneath a highway overpass with other homeless children who dumpster dive for food and prostitute themselves for a few dollars or the promise of a hot meal or drugs. During the day, Celia finds solace in the city library, absorbed by natural history books about butterflies. Sometimes, she returns home to check on her sister, Alyssa, and their mother.
As in The Child Finder, the tale unfolds from the perspectives of an imperilled girl, her captor and the dogged Naomi. But Celia does much of the novel’s heavy lifting. Bright and devoid of selfpity, Celia is bent on saving her sister. Having seen her accusations against Teddy dismissed, she steels herself to rescue Alyssa from Teddy’s predations.
As Naomi observes: “People act as if reporting childhood sexual abuse solved the problem, but Naomi knew that most cases didn’t end in conviction. What no one talked about was what life was like for the victims after acquittal.”
Denfeld reminds us that storytelling remains one of the most powerful means we have of confronting our darkest human impulses. It’s unfortunate that this time, while her pacing is swift, her prose, unfortunately, is often workmanlike, lacking the sheer bravura strangeness of the previous novel.
Still, few people write as well about childhood sexual trauma as Denfeld does — its origins, the legacy that can extend for generations for both victim and perpetrator, and the coping strategies that victims develop to survive. The Washington Post