The Stolen Child by Keith Donohue
(Nan A. Talese, $23.95)

First time novelist Keith Donohue has crafted a fairy tale for adults that starts off with a roar and ends with a whimper. The editors at Amazon.com have all but declared The Stolen Child the best book since sliced bread. I agree that he's working with a dynamite premise, but his writing is often wooden and humorless, a flaw that leeches much of the magic out of the story.
The Stolen Child is inspired by mythological entities called changelings - wilderness hobgoblins who, unbeknownst to humans, switch places with human children and live out their lives. As the novel opens a a tribe of changelings abduct a boy named Henry Day and rename him Aniday. If you can follow me here, a one hundred year old changeling (who was once wrested by changelings from his idyllic childhood in Germany) takes Henry's place in the human world, blending in with most of his friends and family but driving his confused and suspicious father to suicide.

Donohue structures the novel so that Henry and Aniday swap narrator duties. Each chapter narrated by Henry, in other words, is followed by an Aniday adventure. At first this technique made me eager to read long stretches at a time, but after awhile I found it to be rather monotonous.

All this bitching aside, The Stolen Child is a unique and frequently charming book that deserves a wide readership because, well, there's nothing else like it. It's not nearly as good as recent fantasy whoppers like Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy or Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, but it least it reminds us what it feels like to be a wide-eyed and open to all the world's crazy strange possibilities.