Note: Thank you to NetGalley, W.W. Norton & Co,, and Ann Hood for the advanced reader copy of the book. This review will also be posted on NetGalley. What follows is my unbiased review of the book.

This book intrigued me when I read the description, since it’s not the usual World War II historical fiction. The story here goes from the trenches of World War I France to mid-1970s Rhode Island and Europe. It’s the story of regrets and decisions that haunt people, and coming to terms with all of that at the end of one’s life.

Nick Burns was a soldier in the trenches of France during the first World War. As the Germans were overrunning their position, an artist who lived in a nearby home handed him a bundle of her paintings and her newborn son and asked her to take care of them. In a daze, Nick walked through the fighting until he came to a town where he left the bundles near the well in the center of town.

More than fifty years later, Nick is approaching the end of his life. Not knowing what happened to that baby has haunted him for the rest of his life. He decides he needs to learn the truth. He employs a young woman, Jenny, to travel with him to Europe and try to find out what happened to the baby. Jenny has her own secrets that she’s trying to cope with, but her dream is to travel to Europe and this trip with Nick is everything she could hope for.

Meanwhile, in Naples, Italy, Enzo is a man working for his family’s business crafting nativity figures. He has also developed a Museum of Tears, in which he collects the tears of people and keeps track of them. It’s an interesting diversion as he stumbles through life, trying to find his place. The three of them will collide in a most unexpected way.

The theme running through The Stolen Child is regrets. Nick is haunted by his actions as a soldier. Jenny is haunted by a mistake and how she handled it. I wish they’d spent more time with her situation, as I could relate to her situation quite a bit. Author Ann Hood has done a wonderful job, though, crafting a tale about how our actions haunt us, especially when we hold them in and don’t vocalize them. Could Nick have resolved this earlier and possibly had a better life? I think the war, in general, damaged him in ways he couldn’t put to words and the baby was just emblematic of all he suffered.

The story moved through time to a varying degree, especially as it told Enzo’s story and the story of the Museum of Tears. I didn’t find it hard to follow, but there were a couple of times I had to backtrack a bit just to be certain I knew the setting. Otherwise, the story flows nicely and has a good payoff, even if I saw it coming early on. I still wanted to see how it would end, and it was an enjoyable read.