What We’re Reading

The Stolen Child | Keith Donohue

Rating:

At age 7, Henry Day runs away from home and hides himself in an old Chestnut tree in the woods. He thinks he’s clever when he hides from the rescue workers sent out to seek him. But everything changes when his rescue turns instead to a kidnapping.

Told in alternating chapters by Aniday, Henry as a changeling, and Henry, the changeling who took his place, this is a compelling and complex story of the thin line between fantasy and reality, myth and the real world, the search for self and the meaning of family.

After nearly a century living amongst the faeries in the woods, the new Henry is excited to be back in the world. But as he grows he meets with much discontent. A childhood love of music leads to displeasure and disappointment. A search for his original family leads to unsettling realizations. The birth of his own son leads to constant paranoia and worry over the past and what it means for his future.

Aniday, at first confused and alone among the changelings, slowly comes to piece the halves of himself together. He struggles to retain his abilities to read and write, not wanting to lose everything of himself. But memories of his other life, and the family he knows he once had, fade with time, and Speck, Chavisory and the others become his family.

As the outside world encroaches more and more upon the wild, life as a changeling becomes more and more difficult. A series of events, unfortunate and accidently, shakes things up even further, until everyone is left with endless questions and no sense of certainty about the way things are and the way they should be.

Will peace be found by our narrators? can such a thing even be?

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