31 Days of Halloween { book review } The Stolen Child by Keith Donohue
The Stolen Child by Keith Donohue. © 2006 Nan A. Talese. ISBN 9780385516167. Hardcover. Dark Fantasy/Sci-Fi. 327 pages.
Synopsis: 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.
Review: Anything with the title of my favorite Yeats poem will grab my attention, especially if it is indeed a novel about changelings. And I did indeed love the way Donohue wove phrases from the poem into the novel. Hell, I loved the whole novel. Let me say first off I understand how the changeling theme can be seen as a metaphor for growing up, etc., but I don’t care at all about that part. That’s not what held me spellbound. What grabbed me was the updating of the changeling myth. The story of Henry Day and Aniday. The wild children in the woods, never growing, never aging until they replace a child as they were replaced. Is it the fact that Aniday was taken so recently that he is the only changeling who wants to return to his family? Or were the others from worse families? They said they tended to take children who were neglected, abused, sad, bratty–the ones who weren’t so noticed in case the change wasn’t perfect. Sure, the changelings are able to contort and change themselves to look exactly like the stolen child, but sometimes behaviors aren’t exactly right.
Another thing this caused me to ponder is the feral child. Like the changeling, the feral child is a phenomenon that’s always intrigued me. I probably have The Jungle Book to blame for that, though I can’t say where I first heard about the changeling legend. One of those things I feel I’ve always known–part of those Irish myths and legends that nobody in my family ever told me but I’ve always known. Anyway, the way changelings were described in this book were very feral and they couldn’t speak English unless they really concentrated. How many instances of changelings in the wild were feral children? Perhaps even children deemed changelings by parents and left out in the wild to die, but who managed to survive? It’s a fascinating parallel. Wish I thought of it back in college.
This is simply a beautiful book on many levels and it touched me deeply. The current me and the child me who thought she was indeed a changeling.
