Book Review The Child by Fiona Barton

Hello! Today we are going to talk about
The Child by Fiona Barton. It is super creepy, which is definitely in my
wheelhouse so we have got to talk about it! The Child by Fiona Barton. Now don't
worry, I'm not going to give any spoilers in this review, although I really want to!
It's so hard not to because the book is really good and I just want to talk
about the the ending. The ending that I didn't see coming.

I had a friend who
read this book also and said she saw it coming from pretty early on. I didn't see
it coming. So here's the set up: We're following different women in
different stages of their lives who are all concerned with the latest finding. The skeletal remains of a dead baby have been found.

They're really old. We're
talking decades old. But they've been found, and they've got to figure out
whose baby it is. We follow different women who are impacted by the story in
different ways.

There's Kate the 50 year-old old school investigative journalist
in this book who's trying to get to the bottom of the mystery of what's going on,
and who seems to genuinely care about all the people involved in this story.
She just wants to get to the truth so that those involved can find peace. There's also the mom who had lost her baby 40 years ago. It was stolen right out from her when her baby was a newborn at the hospital. And so this mom for 40
years, and the whole family really, has been struggling with, "Where did baby Alice go? What happened?" And so when these skeletal remains show up, the mom is kind
of hoping, I mean morbidly hoping, that there will be a match so that at last
the family can find peace and move past this tragedy that's been hanging over
their heads for 40 years.

There's also Emma. Emma has been
struggling mightily. She is married to a man who's about 20 years
older than her. She has a mom who seems like a miserable mom.

She is kind of a
shut-in. She ghost writes for the ghostwriters so basically she edits and
cleans up their writings that they've done about celebrity memoirs and stuff
like that. All things she can do from home. So throughout the book, we see Kate trying to figure out what's going on, hand-holding the mom as she finds out
about the remains.

What's going on with those. And then we also see Emma
falling more and more apart. Now the thing that was really significant to me in this book is that Emma, she's kind of being Yellow Wallpapered throughout
the book. Let me take a moment to tell you what "The Yellow Wallpaper" is, just in
case you're uninitiated to that story.

"The Yellow Wallpaper" is a short story
that was written many many years ago. It's pretty darn short. And it's public
domain; you can get through it pretty quickly for free. It's about a woman who
has had a baby, she really is probably struggling with postpartum depression
and everyone in her life just wants her to do the rest cure.

They want her
to just hole up in her room rest and do nothing. Nothing. Do not interact with the children. Do not interact with people.

Don't work. Don't write. Don't read. Don't
worry her pretty little head about anything.

Just lie down and do nothing.
Think of nothing. Be nothing. And through that she was supposed to get the cure to
all that ails her. And so we kind of see sort of the same treatment of Emma in
Fiona Martin's The Child.

Emma has been struggling for a long time with mental
illness and depression. And so, you know, there's a lot of coddling. There's a
lot of, "You just rest. Don't you worry about anything.

You don't really need to
go anywhere." And it's not at all that her husband is trying to push her down
or anything like that. Really, her husband is concerned about her. But it's just,
it's a tough situation. So I talked about "The Yellow Wallpaper." I'm going off on a
tangent here.

I'm kind of taking a left turn with this and I'm gonna talk about
Gone Girl for a moment. Gone Girl. If you are one of the, oh I don't know, maybe
three or four people who watch my videos you will have experience
with me ranting and raving quite a bit about people comparing books to Gone
Girl. This is for many reasons.

I love the book Gone Girl and I love many of the other books that have been compared to it. But good gravy can we stop with the
comparisons? Here's why it bothers me so much. #1: The comparison is unfair, both to Gone Girl and to the book that's
being compared to it. It seems like any sort of book with a woman who's maybe
not completely nice, maybe a little bit unbalanced and multi-layered gets compared to Gone Girl.

And so people go into it expecting to get that book, and then
they're disappointed when it's a perfectly good book. It just shouldn't
have been compared to Gone Girl, because it's not Gone Girl. A Separation is a
good example of that, by Katie Kitamura. It was a perfectly fine book, but the heavy
marketing comparing it to Gone Girl kind of, oh it it made me feel disappointed
because I kept waiting for some big twist.

I kept waiting for a woman who is
on the verge of something big and violent and messy and scary, and that's
not at all what the book is. I know I've ranted about that enough, I'm going to leave that book alone, but let me just say, a perfectly good book suffered in
comparison. That's not fair to that book and it's not fair to Gone Girl,
because Gone Girl isn't meant to be this shining beacon on a hill of books about
deranged women. Okay, #2: Here's the other thing that bothers me about it.

Why is it shocking that there is a
multi-dimensional woman? Why is it so shocking that women are sometimes not
completely nice? It's kind of... Oh, kind of small-minded about women. Of course
they're not completely simpering and sweet all the time. Although if they are,
that's fine you know.

Props to those women. And if you're a strong, empowered
woman, you don't have to be completely flawless and unimpeachable and
impeccable in every single way. You can be strong without being absolutely perfect. That's fine if you are; props to those women, too.

But the vast majority of
women have so many layers to them. Sometimes they're strong. Sometimes
they're weak. Sometimes they're nice.

Sometimes they're mean. Sometimes they're perfect. Sometimes they make huge mistakes. Women are just as
multi-dimensional as men are.

And so the fact that people were so shocked by this
character of Amy Dunne and Gone Girl kind of...I mean...Like...Where have you been, people?? Have you never met a woman? I just...Why? Why is that so shocking that there's
a woman that has more than one layer to her? So that that's kind of bothered me
as well. And so people seem to kind of have this breathless anticipation to
have more and more Gone Girls, more and more women on the verge of disaster. And so, that brings me to #3. That's an article that I read very
recently by Emily Martin for Bookriot.

It's a really good article. I'm gonna
link to it so that you all can read it, as well. She takes it a step further,
where she looks at the psychological implications of all of this. So it seems
like in the breathless need to be the next Gone Girl, a lot of these books are
taking women more and more and more to the edge so that their their craziness
is almost a caricature at this point.

And so women, instead of being completely simpering sweet people, are now just unhinged.
Completely unhinged. And it's just taking it to another extreme that again puts
women into a box that they don't belong in, in the first place.
She also points out that there's a strong incidence of either substance
abuse or mental illness that really should be addressed. And it's kind of
setting up these women to be these dangerous women to watch out for when
really they're just women who need treatment. So a good example she gives is
the main character of Girl on on the Train, who may be somehow involved in a murder.

But she's not quite sure because she's a raging alcoholic! Get this woman to a
treatment facility already! So I'm going to read to you a little bit from the
article by Emily Martin for Bookriot, where she draws the comparison
between the off-kilter woman and mental illness, or this stereotype that's been
drawn in books these days. "Her craziness is not a personality and her bouts of
insanity that not even she can control allow for absolutely any twist possible
that the writer wants to imagine. How very convenient. How very lazy.

How very problematic." She has a real way with words. I'm gonna link to her article in the
show notes because I think you should read it for sure. So I'm not drawing any
comparison to The Child here. Don't think that her portrayal of Emma was problematic in any way.

It's a real thin line I'm drawing here to even be
bringing up the Gone Girl phenomenon and the off-kilter woman who really in
reality just needs mental illness treatment. But gosh darn it, it's my
channel, so I'm gonna do it. So in summary, The Child by Fiona Barton. It's really good.

I enjoyed it a lot and I think you will, too. Give it a read and let me know what you think. Thanks for watching! I'll catch you next time. Bye..