The Summer Children by Dot Hutchison

If the Roses of May was a bit of a letdown after The Butterfly Garden, The Summer Children brought the level of the trilogy back up again. Told from Agent Ramirez’s perspective this time, this installment really brought home the agony that working with abused children must bring, particularly for someone who experienced it herself. I liked Mercedes’ point of view, and her connection to the “subjects” is heartbreaking. Bloodied children keep showing up at Mercedes’ door, after an “angel” killed their abusive parents in front of them. The killer is clearly someone who was abused herself, and she trusts Mercedes to take care of these kids after she gets rid of their abusers. The identity of the killer this time is still pretty obvious (obfuscation is not the author’s strongest skill), but the rest of the plot is well done. There is a new addition to the team as well, so maybe the trilogy will be expanded? One can only hope.

The Wake Up by Catherin Ryan Hyde

The Wake Up is a bit of a slow burn of a novel that sucks you in by then end. We first meet Aiden Delacorte as he is getting ready to meet his girlfriend’s kids for the first time. While Gwen’s daughter and Aiden seem to hit it off well, things do go so smoothly with her son, Milo. Withdrawn, barely eating, and with a propensity to hurting animals, Milo is clearly a damaged child, and not very likeable. Aiden has to grapple with whether he can forgive the boy for some things he has done, and come to terms with the terrible things that Milo endured. While any novel involving child abuse is a difficult read, there is a fundamental question in the novel that intrigued me – we can forgive a child’s bad behavior when we know it is a result of unspeakable things that were done to them, but when that child grows up and repeats those unspeakable things we are usually not as forgiving.

As a side plot, Aiden had something that he refers to as his "wake up." After being shut off to all emotion after his mother left his father when he was a young boy, he one day starts to feel all of the emotions of his animals. The deer he shoots, the cows he raises, the rabbits about to be turned into dinner by his neighbors, etc. This makes him have to re-evaluate his life and his work. This semi-magical plot aspect was a little weird, but as someone who doesn't believe in magic but fully believes in fairies that take my stuff and hide it from me, I guess a little bit of the whimsical is okay every now and then.