The Stolen Child
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full
of weeping than you
can understand.
- W.B. Yeats
Keith Donohue draws inspiration from a Yeats poem to pen an imaginative albeit unconventional first novel. "The Stolen Child" is a fantasy book set in the early 20th century, and requires complete suspension of disbelief from page one. The reader who is willing to do that is rewarded with a rich narrative of the life of changelings, whom I had never heard of before, but later understood to be an ancient legend popular in the British Isles.
The Stolen Child tells the story of Henry Day, who runs away from home and hides in the hollow of a tree, where he is kidnapped by a changeling who switches lives with Henry. The book follows the life of the real Henry and the changeling Henry from that point on. The central theme of the book is the double life that the two protagonists lead - intertwined and complicated. Each lives with resentment, anger and fear until, eventually, they come to terms with their own lives. This is not your usual fairy tale - it may be about kids, but not really meant for kids. There is nothing angelic or fairy like about the changelings - they have hard lives and fight for survival, trying to live in the forest far from curious human eyes and scraping out a living from the fringes of human existence.
The book is well written and a definite page turner. The story of the changelings is well narrated enough to make it believable and credible, as well as to generate a genuine interest and empathy towards them. The book may belong to the fantasy genre, but you cannot undermine it as a serious book that takes a hard look at the pains of growing up and finding one's place in the world.
The real Henry struggles to find his place in the forest and he misses his family, while the changelings offer only a little comfort. He ages, while his body still looks that of a seven year old, yet he falls in love, and loses his love, only to resolve to look for her again. The changeling Henry lives in the perpetual fear that his truth would be found out, and that all those who had loved him and given him a new home, would reject him once they know who he really is. Yet, he is intrigued by his old life, the one before he was kidnapped a hundred years ago. Despite the many dangers that it poses to his relatively normal life, he embarks on a journey to find out more about his real family.
A sort of melancholic tone pervades the book, and even though it does not end with a 'happily ever after', the author, to his credit, manages a warm and satisfactory ending, despite the central theme, that could be labeled disturbing. If nothing else, The Stolen Child is an original - a one of a kind fantasy book; a rich, unearthly and remarkable novel and one that you wouldn't regret picking up.
Think you will like "The Stolen Child"? Buy it from Amazon through our associate link and support this site.
Comments are closed for this post.