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A Novel
by Keith DonohueFrom the book jacket: On a summer night, Henry Day runs away from home
and hides in a hollow tree. There he is taken by the changelingsan unaging
tribe of wild children who live in darkness and in secret. They spirit him away,
name him Aniday, and make him one of their own. Stuck forever as a child, Aniday
grows in spirit, struggling to remember the life and family he left behind. He
also seeks to understand and fit in this shadow land, as modern life encroaches
upon both myth and nature.
In his place, the changelings leave a double, a boy who steals Henrys life in
the world. This new Henry Day must adjust to a modern culture while hiding his
true identity from the Day family. But he cant hide his extraordinary talent
for the piano (a skill the true Henry never displayed), and his dazzling
performances prompt his father to suspect that the son he has raised is an
imposter. As he ages the new Henry Day becomes haunted by vague but persistent
memories of life in another time and place, of a German piano teacher and his
prodigy. Of a time when he, too, had been a stolen child. Both Henry and Aniday
obsessively search for who they once were before they changed places in the
world.
Comment: The Stolen Child is one of those out-of-the-box type
novels that tend to either miss by a mile or, like books such as The Time
Traveler's Wife, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, or The Life of Pi,
hit a nerve with people and become tremendously popular. The Stolen
Child's blend of fantasy and realism combined with a classic search for
identity story should place it firmly in the latter category.
A hit in the UK, it did well in hardcover in the USA. Kirkus Reviews
describes it as a a "sparkling debut", Publishers Weekly thinks it is "an
impressive novel of outsiders whose feelings of alienation are more natural than
supernatural," and Waterstones (a leading UK bookseller) describes it as "darkly
captivating and intensely readable.... much more than a modern day fairy
tale."
Donohue says that his first image for The Stolen Child was "of a young
boy hiding in a hollow tree, face pressed against its wooden ribs, determined
not to be found by anyone. His defiant wish to be alone struck me as a universal
gesture--a striking out for independence that children make when frustrated by
the confines of childhood. When the changelings come and get that boy, he
becomes a victim of his own imagination. He is stolen away by his own worst
nightmare. As concerned as I was about the boy hiding in the tree, I also knew
that I wanted to write about an adult struggling to remember the dreams of
childhood. He had to be as trapped and frustrated by the strictures of his
adulthood. And in order for any drama to exist, these two emotional states must
clash."
This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in May 2006, and has been updated for the May 2007 edition. Click here to go to this issue.
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