ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, April 28, 1996 TAG: 9604290135
SECTION: BOOKS PAGE: 4 EDITION: METRO
TYPE: BOOK REVIEW
SOURCE: REVIEWED BY CAMILLE WRIGHT MILLER
THE STOLEN CHILD. By Paul Cody. Baskerville. $20.
Every parent's worst nightmare. In 1963 a boy named Ford was abducted from a Boston suburb. "The Stolen Child" provides witnesses who may or may not have seen the boy and who may or may not have seen the abductor.
The first chapter, the voice of an inmate in Medfield State, a Massachusetts mental hospital, is written so powerfully that as you read the thoughts of a mental patient trying to remember the abduction, your heart races and you stop reading only when you realize you've forgotten to breathe.
The next several chapters seem unrelated to the first, so much so that reading suddenly becomes a chore. And then it connects. The recounting by a waitress who saw a man and boy in a diner in '63, an emergency room doctor who treated a young boy, a prisoner in the cell next to the man who may have abducted the child, the teacher, and the brother left behind give a chilling picture of a stranger abduction.
Cody gives the reader emotional impact rarely found in short novels. So powerful is the picture he paints, it haunts for several nights after the concluding chapter.
Camille Wright Miller is a sociologist and organizational consultant based in Lexington.
LENGTH: Short : 35 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: (headshot) Cody.by CNB