Fiona Barton’s ‘The Child’ will leave you crying for more
Arriving just in time for summer, Fiona Barton’s The Child (Berkley, 365 pp., is a perfect blend of beach read and book club selection. It’s a fascinating and fitting follow-up to her best-selling debut novel, The Widow.
Barton’s idea for her second novel came from her experience as a journalist.
As a reporter, Barton would save news clippings of stories that interested her. And so the inspiration for The Child:
“A paragraph about an infant’s skeleton found in a garden was squirreled away by me many years ago. … I wanted to know who the baby was and why someone had secretly buried it.”
Barton never wrote that story, but she did turn it into a tense and tightly written tale that keeps the reader engaged and entertained.
At the center of The Child is journalist Kate Waters, a supporting character from The Widow. An old-school investigative reporter, Waters’ last big story was two years earlier with the resolution of the abduction and murder of Bella Elliott.
Now Kate is trying to survive in the ever-changing 24-hour cycle newsroom environment where click-bait on celebrities is favored over long-format investigative journalism, and layoffs always loom in the background.
When Kate comes across the headline, “Baby’s Body Found,” she is intrigued. The barest of facts are given — the skeletal remains of a baby are found at a building site in the working-class neighborhood of Woolwich in southeast London. Waters can’t shake the story and starts investigating.
She is paired with a young writer whose reporting experience is more online than realworld. Kate takes him (and the reader) through the process of investigating a story that can’t be done through Web searches only.
During her investigation, Waters crosses paths with three disparate women: Emma, a 40something book editor married
with no children; her mother, Jude; and Angela, a 60something homemaker and grandmother. At the start, there is no apparent connection between Emma and her mother and Angela, except for their interactions with Kate. But as the story progresses, that changes.
In The Child, the suspense comes immediately. The book’s short chapters and multi-narrative device propel readers forward. Drawn back and forth between each character’s back story and their present situation, one is continually figuring out what role each plays in the discovery of the child. And as soon as you think you’ve figured out who did what, it changes. Then changes again.
In addition to being a pageturning whodunit, The Child is also a subtle exploration of the relationships between mothers and their children, bonds and battles. What makes a good mother? When it comes to maternal love, is there a fine line between helping and hindering?
Barton again weaves a tale that keeps us on our toes. A novel that is both fast-paced and thoughtprovoking, it keeps the reader guessing right to the end. The
Child truly is the best of both worlds.