The Stolen Child

From The Stolen Child by Keith Donohue:

I crept back into the house, and pretended to be reading the sports page when he came in. My father stared at me hunched over the newspaper, my long fingers wrapped around a coffee cup. The wet belt of his robe dragged along the floor like a chain. Soaked, disheveled, and unshaven, he seemed much older, but maybe I had not noticed before how he was aging. His hands trembled as if palsied, and he took a Camel from his pocket. The cigarette was too wet to light despite his repeated attempts, so he crumpled the whole pack and tossed it in the trash can. I set a cup of coffee in front of him, and he stared at the steam as if I had handed him poison.

"Dad, are you all right? You look a mess."

"You." He pointed his finger at me like a gun, but that's all he said. The word hung in the air all morning, and I do not think I ever heard him call me "Henry" again.

**

The Stolen Child chronicles the lives of Henry Day. The original Henry Day ran away from home as a child and concealed himself in a hollow tree. He was taken by a band of changelings and replaced by one of their number, a double, the new Henry Day. The first Henry became a changeling himself and was renamed Aniday. The chapters are in alternating points of view between Henry, who is working hard to dispel the Day family suspicions, and Aniday, who is struggling with his new identity in the shadowy edges of the forest.

I really did enjoy this one, especially the first couple of chapters, in which the structure of changeling abilities and motivations were explained. But after that things got bogged down. Henry and Aniday lived their separate lives, rarely intersecting as much as I hoped they would. Henry had some initial hurdles to overcome, but otherwise was a mostly dull human. Aniday had his own troubles but was mainly just wandering in the woods. I didn't feel much sympathy of either one of them, and I think that I was supposed to. I hoped for an explosive confrontation of an ending, and it came, but it felt somewhat flat and dry.

But overall I am still intrigued and haunted by this one. I love the concept of impostors. I love secret identities. I love the concept that you can never really know someone, even if you have lived with that person for decades.