Keith Donohue, The Stolen Child (Doubleday, 2006)
The Stolen Child is a tale of madness. There is some sort of redemption at the end of it, but it is dearly won.
The premise of the story is that all the old stories of changelings are based on a nasty truth. There is a race of beings, the faeries or hobgoblins, who look like disfigured children. They live in the wilderness, spying on humans. At some point, the eldest in each clan will change places with a human child, taking over his or her life. The kidnapped child will be transformed into a faerie, condemned to forget the old life for a hundred years or more till it is his or her turn to make the change.
There are a few holes in this premise. Did the faeries come to North America with the Europeans, or were there North American populations of them already? Where did they come from to begin with? They can't reproduce. Their population can only remain stable (straight exchange) or decrease (a faerie dies before having made the change). They mention a few times that when deciding what child to exchange with they try to find one who is unhappy or neglected. Why on earth would they want to take over the life of someone unhappy? If I was into swapping lives with someone, I'd want one that looked like it was going to be good.
Heading back into the land of willing suspension of disbelief, The Stolen Child is told in alternating chapters by Aniday, who was stolen by the faeries when he was seven, and Henry Day, the faerie who took his place. Of course, Aniday is really Henry Day, and Henry Day is really somebody else. He spends quite a bit of his adult life trying to find out who or what he was, and the bits of answers he comes up with seem to send him farther into madness. (Of course, if you had bits of memories of three lives, you'd be a little tetched, too.)
At the same time, Aniday is trying to figure out who he really is and to make a life for himself in the woods with the tribe of faeries who kidnapped him.
The book spans about thirty years in the lives of Henry Day and Aniday, from the 1950s to the 1980s, not to mention flashbacks to a hundred years or so earlier. Aniday would be only a couple of years older than I am, and the descriptions of that period didn't make me even slightly nostalgic. For both changeling and kidnapped, things were pretty bleak.
Each had a source of solace, though. For Aniday it is literature, for Henry Day, music. The books and music they write seem to be all that can save them from the madness of their (multiple) lives.
Now that we're back to the theme of madness for a moment, The Stolen Child doesn't do badly at showing the effect of the change on the families. One unusual point, at least to me, is that the mothers seem to accept the changelings but the fathers never quite manage to do so, and this drives them mad, too. Perhaps it's because the author is a man -- as a woman, I seem to have been socialized to assume that the mother would know her own child while the father would be content enough to count heads. Maybe a mother will accept anything to love, while a father wants to be sure it's his own DNA sleeping under his roof.
The Stolen Child is Keith Donohue's first novel. He is a former speechwriter at the National Endowment for the Arts, which probably explains why both his heroes find such comfort in the arts. His Web site is here. On it, among other things, he recommends Folklinks, compiled by D.L. Ashilman, as an excellent place to start any research you might want to do into changelings. I suspect he's right.
