This is a lovely book. Really, I've searched my memory banks for a better adjective, and I can't find one. "The Stolen Child," the debut novel by D.C.-based speech writer Keith Donohue, is a beautifully written, dual-narrative memoir told by flip sides of the same character: a boy named Henry Day who disappeared in the woods near his home in the 1950s, and his changeling -- the supernatural creature who replaced him. Each struggles to remember his former life before the changelings tore him away from the existence that was his birthright.
I won't get into too much detail, as that would feel like writing a book report, and who wants to write, or read, that?
I'll let one of the excerpts speak for itself. After a lifetime of sorting out their respective identities and making peace with the swap that has changed and defined them both forever, the missing boy Henry Day and the changeling who supplanted him say goodbye. The setting is a community concert -- the premiere of the latter's symphony, "The Stolen Child":
Henry kept smiling and playing, and like a book the music told a story that seemed, in part, a gift -- as if, in our only common language, he was expressing what beat in his heart. Some sorrow, perhaps, some remorse. It was enough for me. The music carried us in two directions, as if above and below; and in the interludes, the spaces between the notes, I thought he, too, was trying to say goodbye, goodbye to the double life. The organ breathed and laid sound upon sound, and then exhaled into silence. "Aniday," Luchog hissed, and I shrank from the window to the ground. A beat or two, and the crowd burst like a thunderstorm. One by one, we faeries rose and disappeared into the falling darkness, gliding past the gravestones and back into the forest, as if we had never been among the people.
Like this? If so, read more about the book on Amazon, where Donohue maintains an author blog.
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