I believe this was the first book by Shreve that I read. It was an intense read about a girl that leaves her baby out in the woods to die and the family that comes to take care of it. We had a good discussion about it in my book club.

One of this talented author's lesser efforts -- I read everything by Anita Shreve, but this one did not measure up.

Not long before Christmas 1983, 12-year-old Nicky Dillon and her father Robert, walking in the woods near their house in New Hampshire, come across a baby girl wrapped in a bloody towel, the remnants of her umbilical cord still attached. They race her to the hospital, she survives, and the police launch a hunt for the parents. The Dillons' discovery opens the still-fresh wound inflicted on a mid-December day two years earlier when Nicky's mother and one-year-old sister Clara were killed in a car crash. Robert fled Westchester with his daughter, hoping to escape their memories in rural isolation. When the infant's 19-year-old mother turns up, he doesn't want to have anything to do with her, but he finds he can't turn her in either when a convenient fainting spell and blizzard trap Charlotte in their house. Looking back on these events at age 30—for no evident reason except to give us some reassuring flash-forwards at the close—Nicky mingles the gradual unfolding of Charlotte's story (the rotten father exposed the baby and lied to her about it) with her memories of Mom and Clara and her worries about Dad. A sympathetic local detective's gradual closing in on Charlotte provides the not-very-suspenseful plot movement. The whole tale seems contrived, right down to Nicky's climactic, too-pat confrontation with her father. "Are you just trying to stay sad? To hold on to Mom and Clara?" do not seem like the insights of a 12-year-old. Everything is too easy here, including the fact that we never meet the boy who actually left the newborn to die, so readers can feel comfortably sorry for everyone without having to grapple with any messy moral issues.

This book is the first by this author that I have read. I really enjoyed the book up until the last chapter and just didn't like the way the book ended. I suppose I was looking for something more and it didn't materialise.

Blurb:
Walking through new-fallen snow in the forest near their home, twelve year old Nicky Dillon and her father come upon something inconceivable there, in the pristine winter scene, an abandoned infant wails, its survival made possible only by the coincidence of their having chosen this path for their evening stroll.