Review: The Stolen Child, by Keith Donohue
I just finished The Stolen Child, which is essentially a fairy tale about changelings. It is beautifully written, but overwhelmingly sad. The Amazon.com synopsis reads:
From Publishers Weekly
Folk legends of the changeling serve as a touchstone for Donohue's haunting debut, set vaguely in the American northeast, about the maturation of a young man troubled by questions of identity. At age seven, Henry Day is kidnapped by hobgoblins and replaced by a look-alike impostor. In alternating chapters, each Henry relates the tale of how he adjusts to his new situation. Human Henry learns to run with his hobgoblin pack, who never age but rarely seem more fey than a gang of runaway teens. Hobgoblin Henry develops his uncanny talent for mimicry into a music career and settles into an otherwise unremarkable human life. Neither Henry feels entirely comfortable with his existence, and the pathos of their losses influences all of their relationships and experiences. Inevitably, their struggles to retrieve their increasingly forgotten pasts put them on paths that intersect decades later. Donohue keeps the fantasy as understated as the emotions of his characters, while they work through their respective growing pains. The result is an impressive novel of outsiders whose feelings of alienation are more natural than supernatural.
This, like The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly, is one of those fairy tales that takes awhile to fully digest. It has several rather haunting themes, the one that stood out to me the most being, how well can a parent ever know their child?. The story is extremely well written and switches back and forth in perspective from the changeling who becomes Henry Day, to the child who becomes a changeling. The changeling Henry Day ages like a normal human, but the original Henry Day, stolen away from his human life, remains eternally seven years old, although he would have been in his thirties at the end of the book. As the changeling settles into life as Henry Day, the seven-year-old child he was becomes remarkably more mature than his now-human counterpart in many ways.
I loved this book. It took me a few chapters to get into it - the changeling who becomes Henry Day starts out as quite a snotty little brat - but the narrative sucks you in, and you can't help but try to figure out how it will be resolved in the end. It was not the ending I expected, and I think the book is richer for that. I would definitely recommend this book - it is dark and poignant, but uplifting in that it is a story extremely well-told.
