The Stolen Child

#43Title: The Stolen Child
Author: Keith Donohue
Publisher: Anchor
Year: 2006
Genre: Fiction/Fantasy
336 pages

A beautiful first novel about identity, identification, belonging, memory, personal history, and orientation in time and cultural history. Donohue elaborates on fairy/hobgoblin mythology through the voices of two boys, one a human boy stolen from his life, one the changeling who replaces him and, in attempting to regain his humanity, struggles to recall his previous boyhood before he, too, was stolen. Both narrators feel authentic and their experiences and preoccupations parallel each other organically rather than mechanistically.

The only points where I was drawn out of the narrative were times when I wasn't sure whether a narrator was confused or an editing problem had occurred. These were all related to small temporal considerations; since confusion about time and experience is one of the tropes, I've decided in retrospect that I was probably noticing the narrators' confusion.

I picked this up in the airport in Atlanta and read it straight through by my Phoenix plane change. The last time I chose reading over sleep on a flight this long was in 1987 when I read Keri Hulme's The Bone People on a Tel Aviv-Paris-US flight.