The Stolen Child [Paperback]

Keith Donohue has brought forth a magical debut novel full of insights into childhood and adulthood and the seemingly endless longing that largely defines both. He conjures a world of ancient legend and places it on the outskirts of modern civilization, thereby casting an insightful eye upon both. Like many a story related to childish subjects, there is a complexity here of subtle strength and great depth that speaks to some of the most poignant thoughts and emotions of man. The Stolen Child is a truly enchanting tale that delves into man's eternal questions about the meaning and purpose of life even as it paints the pictures of two extraordinary lives linked together by a common identity.

The Stolen Child tells the story of Henry Day - both the boy who was born Henry Day and the changeling who assumed Henry Day's identity at the age of seven. The changelings, of course, are creatures out of centuries-old legend, said to steal children and leave defective changeling impostors in their place. The changelings in this novel are not the ugly little monsters who brought terror into the minds of our distant ancestors, however. They are essentially ageless children, each of them waiting patiently yet interminably for their turn to sneak back into the upper world of humans in place of some other stolen youngster. Young Henry Day finds himself stolen, baptized in the river into an entirely new life, and welcomed into a group of eleven changelings. He learns their ways as his previous memories quickly begin to fade - but his new life as Aniday is far from idyllic. His rare encounters with humans disturb him, keeping awake a spark within him of the family he left behind and a deep yearning to return. Unlike his new friends, he longs for paper and pencil, feeling the need to write down what he still remembers and to chronicle the story of his new life as the years come and go.

Having finally fulfilled his decades-old dream to return to human life, the new Henry Day faces his own obstacles. Having taken the exact features of the stolen child, he gives Henry's parents no reason to question that he is their son - not at first, anyway. There are noticeable differences, however - his new passion and natural skill at music being the most obvious. He has to remember to grow (and to do so in all the right places). And there is always an underlying sense of guilt in the back of his mind, one which is further complicated in time by his growing memories of his own stolen childhood in 19th century Germany.

Both Henry and Aniday seek a deeper meaning to their uncommon lives: Henry through his music and Aniday through the preservation of his memories in writing. Neither finds fulfillment or peace on his own, for they are two souls tied together in ways neither can truly fathom. Neither can begin to understand who he really is without coming to terms with who he used to be. Fate decrees that their worlds intersect on several occasions, as each one's search for his own identity seems to lead him closer and closer to the other. There are tragedies and triumphs along the way, and I must say I found the tragedies surprisingly powerful and emotional. You read this novel with your heart as much as your mind.

Donohue truly immerses you in the very different yet parallel worlds of Henry and Aniday, and you can't help but feel a close affinity to them both, particularly the latter. You might think the constant switching of viewpoint and narration between the two protagonists would prove clumsy or disorienting, but this is not the case at all. Indeed, the narrative of one constantly reinforces the other, especially when you get two divergent viewpoints of the same event. Keith Donohue may be a new name on the literary scene, but he's a master storyteller and a true maestro of the written word. Much like the fabled music of the wee folks, his writing mesmerizes and transports you to a completely magical realm that feels somehow strangely familiar, and you emerge from the final page as a changeling of sorts yourself, forever altered on a deeply personal level by this too-brief encounter with the Henry Day who was and the Henry Day who is.

THE STOLEN CHILD, an ingeniously crafted tale about hobgoblins, is a coming of age story and one about identities both lost and found. This beguiling yet tragic novel is placed in the recent past when, at least in the "sophisticated" and technology driven West, the faery myths have lost their hold on the popular consciousness and the creatures have thus become, to our loss, an endangered species joining griffins, mermaids, gorgons, centaurs, and unicorns.

It's the late 1940s in a rural setting outside Chicago. Seven year-old Henry Day, alone in the woods near his home, is abducted by a band of a dozen hobgoblins, which, in mythology, are faeries "gone bad". By the story's definition, each hobgoblin was once human before being kidnapped while still young and, by some subtle process, turned into a creature that never ages, even over hundreds of years. At some point, determined by seniority within the group, a hobgoblin, or "changeling", can return to the society of humans by co-opting the identity of a kidnapped child. Once returned to the "upper world", the hobgoblin takes up the aging process where he/she left off. In this case, Henry, now "Aniday", languishes in the purgatory of eternal childhood while his replacement matures to fully actualized adulthood as "Henry Day". Aniday's tragedy comprises an identity and life's potential lost, while Henry's is that his new identity vies with that of his previous human existence, began in 1851, which Day subliminally remembers and eventually obsesses over.

The novel's thirty-six chapters alternate between Aniday and Henry, each telling his first-person story as it extends over three decades, the history of each touching at points with the other until a final confrontation, such as it is.

This is Keith Donohue's first novel, and I'm awarding five stars for cleverness, though it does have problems which would compel me to award only four if coming from a more accomplished author. The story concludes in a way that was, for me, very unfulfilling; I thought it lacked closure for both characters. Also, the hobgoblins, who were all once human and can become so again anytime they chose, now live a wretched, unhygienic, near-starvation existence continually exposed to the elements and possible injury while subsisting only with the help of food, garb, and utensils scavenged or stolen from humans. (Indeed, the mischievous hobgoblin will steal one sock from a clothesline to create "the mystery of the missing sock from every washday".) That being the case, the author, while removing for the reader much of the magic, mystery and whimsicality of the faeries' existence, supplies no compelling imperative for them to remain the creatures they are. Indeed, they exist at all because human society once believed in their reality, and they now approach extinction because the twentieth century's technological enlightenment leaves them no room.

THE STOLEN CHILD is a fairy tale for adults that transcends standard fare.

This haunting and beautifully written debut novel had me compulsively turning its pages. I simply could not put it down! The author has created a fantasy world that exists on the cusp of the consciousness of humans. It is a world that is the stuff of fairy tales, only the author has turned it into one that is fitting for adults. Lyrical in its telling, the author spins a story about a world that exists side by side with the one that we inhabit everyday. It is a world of the changelings. These are creatures that exist only to burrow into our lives by usurping the place of a human child. How they do it, why they do it, and the ramifications of their actions are at the crux of this fascinating and wonderful, poignantly told story.
It is a story that is charged with great emotional impact, as it conveys the desire that each one of us has to fit into the social fabric that is woven around every one of us from that day that we are born.
This is simply one of the best books that I have read this year. Bravo!