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A Novel
by Keith Donohue
Book Reviewed by:Inspired by the W.B. Yeats poem that tempts a child from home to the waters and the wild, The Stolen Child is a modern fairy tale narrated by the child Henry Day and his double.
Inspired by the
W.B. Yeats poem that tempts a child from home to the waters and the wild, The
Stolen Child is a modern fairy tale narrated by the child Henry Day and his
double.
On a summer night, Henry Day runs away from home and hides in a hollow tree.
There he is taken by the changelings—an 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 Henry’s 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 can’t 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.
The Stolen Child is a classic tale of leaving childhood and the search
for identity. With just the right mix of fantasy and realism, Keith Donohue has
created a bedtime story for adults and a literary fable of remarkable depth and
strange delights.
CHAPTER 1
Don’t call me a
fairy. We don’t like to be called fairies anymore. Once upon a time, fairy
was a perfectly acceptable catchall for a variety of creatures, but now it has
taken on too many associations. Etymologically speaking, a fairy is something
quite particular, related in kind to the naiads, or water nymphs, and while of
the genus, we are sui generis. The word fairy is drawn from fay
(Old French fee), which itself comes from the Latin Fata, the
goddess of fate. The fay lived in groups called the faerie, between the heavenly
and earthly realms.
There exist in this world a range of sublunary spirits that carminibus coelo
possunt deducere lunam, and they have been divided since ancient times into
six kinds: fiery, aerial, terrestrial, watery, subterranean, and the whole class
of fairies and nymphs. Of the sprites of fire, water, and air, I know next to
nothing. But the terrestrial and underground devils I know all too well, and of
...
The Stolen Child is one of those out-of-the-box type novels that tend to either miss by a mile or, like 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...continued
Full Review
(276 words)
(Reviewed by BookBrowse Review Team).
Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveler's Wife
The Stolen Child is unsentimental and vividly imagined. Keith Donohue evokes the otherworldly with humor and the ordinary with wonder. I enjoyed it immensely.The Stolen Child is Keith Donohue's first novel. He lives in Maryland, near
Washington, D.C. and was, for many years, a speechwriter at the National
Endowment for the Arts.
The Stolen Child is inspired by the poem of the same name by W.B. Yeats (bio).
Yeats first published The Stolen Child in The Wanderings of Oisin and
Other Poems (1889), the volume of poetry that established his
reputation. This is the first verse:
Where dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
The drowsy water-rats;
There we've hid our faery vats,
Full of berries
And of reddest stolen cherries.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For ...
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