A Child Lost – a Review

While attending Mundelein College, Elsie discovers a young girl apparently living in the caretaker’s hut. When she learns why and how Anna came to be living with Gunther, she wants to help. And Anna has epilepsy. This sickness was greatly misunderstood and feared in the 1930s, and little Anna is in danger of being placed in some kind of institution.

Elsie begs Clive and Henrietta Howard (her sister) to help her find Liesl Klinkhammer, the little girl’s mother. It is a simple case of a missing person. But it turns into so much more.

Meanwhile, they have been asked to investigate a spiritualist.  She has set up business in an abandoned schoolhouse on the edge of town and has been accused of coercing at least one of her clients out of jewelry. Clive believes that this could help Henrietta come out of her depression from having a miscarriage. But when they pay this spiritualist a visit, she tells Henrietta things about the child she has just lost that she shouldn’t have known.

Liesl Klinkhammer was eventually found, but she had died a few weeks previously. She was being treated for schizophrenia at Dunning Asylum, and the treatments were brutal and barbaric at the time. Electric shock treatment. Hosing. These treatments probably did more harm than good. They definitely didn’t help her sickness.

Even though Anna, fluent in German, speaks only bits of English, Elsie becomes attached to her. Elsie’s gift to Anna, A Child’s Garden of Verses, becomes so special to this little girl that when she is taken to Dunning Asylum against Gunther’s will after an epileptic fit, she carries the book with her.

Clive and Henrietta go to Dunning to retrieve her. While there they meet some very strange people and Henrietta begins to suspect that something much darker is going on at the asylum than the innocent treatment of sick people. But Clive doesn’t take her beliefs seriously. So Henrietta decides to do some investigating of her own, investigating that could have fatal effects.

I really enjoyed this book. The look at how epilepsy as well as schizophrenia and other mental illnesses were treated in the 1930s was a bit scary and interesting. Clive and Henrietta’s investigation, especially nearing the end of the book, will keep you on the edge of your seat or cause you to pace the floor. I highly recommend this book to lovers of mysteries that keep you in suspense. Amidst the suspense, this book gives an interesting look at life in the 1930s as well, so I would also recommend it to historical fiction lovers.

I was sent a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. If you would like to purchase your own copy of this book, I’ve provided an Amazon link below. You’re also invited to enter the giveaway.

Amazon Links:

A Child Lost

A Child’s Garden of Verses

a Rafflecopter giveaway This giveaway is open to Canada, the U.S. , and UK only and ends on March 31, 2021,midnight pacific time. If you live in the UK, the amount will be the equivalent in pounds. Entries are accepted via Rafflecopter only.

Favorite Sentences:

It had been, truth be told, ever since her rather unexpected discovery of a small girl named Anna apparently living in Gunther’s hut behind Piper Hall.

Anyone this good and this compassionate, this intelligent and caring, who could hold a child as tenderly as he held a poem was to be desired beyond any, no matter what other horrors he had yet to tell.

My God, was Elsie so love-sick that she fell in love with every man that even remotely came into her life?

What horrors had they seen that were somehow worse than the horror of being here, if that were even possible?

The stench was still there, though, as was the thick feeling of despair that seemed to emanate from every surface, even from the dull, peeling walls themselves.

New Words Learned:          

bourgeois – belonging to or characteristic of the middle class, typically with reference to its perceived materialistic values or conventional attitudes

euchre – Cards. a game played by two, three, or four persons, usually with the 32, but sometimes with the 28 or 24, highest cards in the pack.

garret window – a skylight that lies along the slope of the roof

miasma – noxious exhalations from putrescent organic matter; poisonous effluvia or germs polluting the atmosphere

transom window – a small hinged window above a door or another window

About the Author:

Michelle Cox is the author of the multiple award-winning Henrietta and Inspector Howard series as well as Novel Notes of Local Lore, a weekly blog dedicated to Chicago’s forgotten residents. She suspects she may have once lived in the 1930s and, having yet to discover a handy time machine lying around, has resorted to writing about the era as a way of getting herself back there. (Her books have been praised by Kirkus, Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, Booklist, and many others, so she might be on to something.)

Unbeknownst to most, Cox hoards board games she doesn’t have time to play and is, not surprisingly, addicted to period dramas and big band music. Also, marmalade.

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