- Hobgoblins, Changelings, Faeries – I love them all.
- I’m a huge fan of dark fairy-tale fiction.
- Again, cover girl – how could I resist that cover?
- The Child Thief by Brom
- Crazy by Han Nolan (YA)
- Coraline by Neil Gaiman (YA)
Summary from GoodReads:
Inspired by the W.B. Yeats poem that tempts a child from home to the waters and the wild, The Stolen Child is a modern fairy tale narrated by the child Henry Day and his double.
On a summer night, Henry Day runs away from home and hides in a hollow tree. There he is taken by the changelings—an unaging tribe of wild children who live in darkness and in secret. They spirit him away, name him Aniday, and make him one of their own. Stuck forever as a child, Aniday grows in spirit, struggling to remember the life and family he left behind. He also seeks to understand and fit in this shadow land, as modern life encroaches upon both myth and nature.
In his place, the changelings leave a double, a boy who steals Henry’s life in the world. This new Henry Day must adjust to a modern culture while hiding his true identity from the Day family. But he can’t hide his extraordinary talent for the piano (a skill the true Henry never displayed), and his dazzling performances prompt his father to suspect that the son he has raised is an imposter. As he ages the new Henry Day becomes haunted by vague but persistent memories of life in another time and place, of a German piano teacher and his prodigy. Of a time when he, too, had been a stolen child. Both Henry and Aniday obsessively search for who they once were before they changed places in the world.
My Review:
I feel cheated. I mean, I just sat through a few hundred pages, anxiously turning the page, hoping for some action, for something twisted to occur – heck for anything to occur – but it never happened.
Sure, there were tidbits of action in The Stolen Child by Keith Donohue. There is the swap of a child and his replacement, something I would imagine to be every parents nightmare. There’s a rag-tag little gang of children that reminded me of Peter Pan’s “Lost Boys” running about, but.. although they supposedly had a bunch of rules they never seemed to follow any of them.
I mean, honestly – this book is called The Stolen Child and the description talks about how these two obsessively try to figure out who they were before, yet the obsessiveness didn’t even happen until 2/3rds of the way through the book, just when I was starting to feel the boredom creeping in and I was fighting the temptation to throw the book across the room.
I feel like I read a whole lot of nothing. And I’m disappointed, because this story is based on such an exciting premise. Stolen children and hobgoblings should make for a fantastic story filled with adventure, mystery and a touch of horror. Am I wrong in thinking that? Instead I got an incredibly tame coming of age story with just a touch of the magic required by having a magical creature in the book.
I want to invite you to check out these other reviews for some different opinions, but my opinion is.. you’d be better off reading some of the titles I’ve recommended above.
Check out these review(s):
