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The Stolen Child: A Novel
Product: The Stolen Child: A Novel
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List Price: $23.95
Our Price: $16.29
Your Save: $ 7.66 ( 32% )
Availability: Temporarily out of stock. Order now and we'll deliver when available. We'll e-mail you with an estimated delivery date as soon as we have more information. Your credit card will not be charged until we ship the item.
Manufacturer: Nan A. Talese
Book written by: Keith Donohue
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Product Description: The Stolen Child: A Novel
Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.6
EAN: 9780385516167
ISBN: 0385516169
Label: Nan A. Talese
Manufacturer: Nan A. Talese
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 336
Publication Date: 2006-05-09
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Release Date: 2006-05-09
Studio: Nan A. Talese
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Editorial Reviews about The Stolen Child: A Novel:
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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.
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Spotlight customer reviews about The Stolen Child: A Novel:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Wonderful
Comment: Love, love, love this book...will read it again and I NEVER read books more than once. Donohue captures the feelings of Henry and the changeling so well...their sadness and loss are palpable. And the ending is perfection.
Customer Rating:
Summary: "This child and I were bound together."
Comment: Two perspectives of the same life - one through the eyes of the Changeling who has stolen the life of Henry Day and the other, Henry Day searching for his life again. The back and forth is well-balanced and even as I routed for the demise of the Changelings, it was a sad to think of their "extinction". Fading out of memory, another fairy-tale told to scare children. The Changeling's search into his own past to find out who he was before he was stolen some 100 years back added a great layer under and over - and mirrored nicely the symphony being constructed by the Changeling.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A promising notion that fails to deliver
Comment: There are two earmarks in this novel that mark it as a first effort: First, the author flails in the center of the story, running the characters around in directions that rarely have an ultimate purpose. The imaginative and authentic parts in this tale could easily be condensed into a novella or even a long short story.
Second, the author repeatedly skims over the surface of his story, neatly avoiding emotional depth and not exploiting the juicy, gutsy elements. He sidles up to the heat, then backs away, sidles up, backs away. There are near-misses too numerous to count. Over and over, Henry and Aniday internally consider all they want to say to their female companions...but then they just don't. After Henry disappears into a German library for twelve or fourteen hours while on their honeymoon (during which time he takes a young librarian out for coffee to get information) Tess doesn't say ANYTHING about his absence. Not buying it! Donohue just doesn't want to spill any real emotional blood on the page, and frankly, that is the very hard work of writing fiction--NOT backing off when things get intense. He doesn't even get real about sex, even on Henry and Tess's honeymoon. The `tiny penis' scene from Henry's early teens was just weird enough to carry fantastical verisimilitude, but when Henry marries and actual sex is available, the closest Donohue comes to describing their physical pairing is to say they had a lot more sex in Czechoslovakia. One tasteful description of sex adds metric tons of realism to a human story.
There are other problems, too. Why does it take such a long time to choose a replacement child? The description of the process doesn't sound as though it should take decades, if not more than a century. As another reviewer asked, if they could simply turn up in civilization, why didn't they?
While the character of Aniday starts out as an interesting mix of confusion and naïveté, the character of Henry is a droner. His internal monologue is grim, pessimistic, and unrelentingly self-centered--boring.
Other than Spech, the female characters are flat as smashed pennies. The female fairies are hardly distinguishable from one another and they seem to be there mainly to be sexually exploited. The females in Henry's life are not persons, but limp plot devices, there to make some point about Henry's life. The mother is a stereotypical doting mom, the sisters are stereotypically mouthy kids/teens, Tess is a girlfriend character straight out of a romance comic book--yawn.
My experience with The Stolen Child was hauntingly familiar to my experience with The Historian: When does the story happen???
Customer Rating:
Summary: The Bookschlepper Recommends
Comment: Gustav is seized by the changelings, lives 100 years in the forest as Chopin and becomes Henry Day, suddenly proficient in music. The original Henry survives his capture, becomes Aniday and learns the ways of the forest. Their two stories and lives intertwine and each seeks to remember the past, to answer the question "who am I?" and to love. This is a poignant, haunting first novel of fantasy and clarity.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Magical and lyric
Comment: A beautiful book, well written and well thought out. Inspired by Yeats's poem of the same name. Sad, mysterious and utterly engaging, the book is not only a great story, but a meditation on loneliness, longing and belonging. Recommended.
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