REVIEW: The Stolen Child by Keith Donohue

TITLE: The Stolen Child
AUTHOR: Keith Donohue
PUBLISHER: Random House ( May 2006)
ISBN:0 224 076 973 PRICE: $32.95 (paperback) 319pages

Reviewed by Ann Skea (ann@skea.com).
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Every child acts strangely at times, and every parent wonders where that
behaviour came from, where it was learned or whose genes might be responsible
for it. "Must have been swapped at birth", we sometimes joke, disowning
responsibility. But in more superstitious times we might not have been joking.
Changelings, children stolen away by the faeries, trolls, green-men, wodwoes,
hobgoblins, mischievous little people who are sometimes glimpsed and often
placated by special greetings or by food left on the doorstep at night, all
these are common in folk-lore. And in many places the belief in such things
still lingers.

Keith Donohue draws on these stories and weaves an intriguing tale of two boys,
both of whom have at one time in their lives been stolen from their families
and a changeling left in their place. Now, in alternating chapters, they tell
their strange stories and gradually their lives begin to touch.

For Henry Day, aged seven, the book begins with the end of his normal family
life and the beginning of his existence as Aniday amongst the unaging, feral
hobgoblins who haunt the local woods. He has much to learn.

Meanwhile, the new Henry Day who takes his place must transform himself from
hobgoblin to human child and convince his new human family that he is their
child. Much preparation has already taken place, but for him, too, this is a
challenging learning experience.

The Stolen Child starts rather slowly, but as events bring Aniday and Henry Day
closer to each other the tale becomes more interesting. Aniday forms a close
relationship with Speck, a girl hobgoblin who helps him to understand the
unwritten laws by which the hobgoblins live, the hierarchy through which they
may someday return to the human world, and the careful and dangerous process by
which this may be achieved. Aniday sees what happens when such an attempt fails
and, in the process, comes into brief, forbidden contact with his human
father.

The new Henry Day progresses through childhood, school, college and marriage,
always with the knowledge that he was once (before he was stolen away and lived
as a hobgoblin) someone else. Scraps of memory surface, and a precocious
musical gift, which puzzles him and his family and sets him looking for his
past. His search and his strange and obsessive behaviour have real parallels in
our everyday world amongst people with Asperger syndrome. And, as he learns
more about his first human identity and the shadowy figure of Aniday, the boy
he replaced, begins to have real presence in his life a crisis threatens.

Keith Donohue's exploration of these two lives becomes more absorbing as
suggestions of the real psychological dilemmas of a split personality surface,
but these are never elaborated and the book never loses hold of the imaginative
fantasy which lies at its heart. Donohue walks the thin line between the
believable and the wholly fantastic with skill. And anyone who still harbours
even the vaguest suspicion that there might be something unknown and dangerous
out there in the darkness will probably enjoy this book.

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Copyright © Ann Skea 2006