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3.86 AVERAGE
3.86 AVERAGE
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
mysterious
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
I’ve read a million changeling stories and kind of expected this to just be another one but I was extremely wrong. Brilliant odyssey with a super complex and original but cohesive plot, poignant humanness commentary, great balance of myth/humor/terror. I was hooked the whole time and basically read it in one sitting.
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
adventurous
dark
mysterious
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
adventurous
dark
emotional
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
This was one of the best books I read in 2024! I closed the book and continued to repeat, “I am the god Apollo” for weeks.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Child death
I picked this up because I have loved Victor LaValle; I had to remind myself of that halfway through when I went "hold on, why am I reading a contemporary novel about parenting." The pacing is weird until about 1/2 or 3/4ths of the way through, then it gallops gleefully til the end.
Genuinely exhausting baby brain section though. Seems very accurate.
Genuinely exhausting baby brain section though. Seems very accurate.
This is the second to last book of my run of horror books in the month of October and probably my favorite read. I appreciate Victor's ability to blend Old World mythology and superstition with modern day sensibilities. He spends an incredible amount of the book on framing and set-up. I was halfway through the book and wondering if I understood the genre. Then, the plunge.
The Changeling explores grief, family, lineage and legacy, and here, I will say no more.
I highly recommend if you're a fan of Neil Gaiman and Stephen King, though there is no doubt that Victor LaValle has a voice all his own.
The Changeling explores grief, family, lineage and legacy, and here, I will say no more.
I highly recommend if you're a fan of Neil Gaiman and Stephen King, though there is no doubt that Victor LaValle has a voice all his own.
dark
mysterious
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
So the moral of the story is...reuniting your family is more important than taking domestic abuse seriously, so long as it's the wife who
That's a bit glib--it's only an unintentional moral. But frankly I couldn't like any of the characters. Apollo isn't a good husband. His mother kept important secrets about his father that. His friend Patrice wasn't a good friend helping him deal with the apparent death of his baby. I guess the baby is innocent? (Though we don't see much of him). I guess this is realistic? But there just didn't seem much about the characters to redeem them
The sad thing is that I could have enjoyed this if the characters weren't lousy people. Okay, the book is slow to start. Some people said that it seemed like it switched genres. I think that was deliberately. If I'd cared about the characters, the slow start probably wouldn't have seemed slow. The ending would have redeemed any slowness.
This is a high 1, but I can't justify anything but a 1 star for a book that's okay with spousal abuse.
Spoiler
bashes her husbands head so hard and repeatedly that his eye comes out of his skull. Sure, Apollo wasn't the best husband, but there's no way he deserved it. And if he did, well, that would be a different reason that they shouldn't get back together. I looked for something, anything, to for Apollo and Emma to come to grips with that, but LaValle didn't even try. I guess we are supposed to accept that she wasn't in her right mind because her kid had been replaced by a changeling, which was upsetting, but still nowhere near enough. Seriously, I might have accepted possession as a reasonable excuse.That's a bit glib--it's only an unintentional moral. But frankly I couldn't like any of the characters. Apollo isn't a good husband. His mother kept important secrets about his father that
Spoiler
could have gotten him killed? I'm actually not sure of the timeline. It sounded like his father visited him from time to time after separating from his mother, but then it was seemed to be retconned so that actually his mother killed his father and hid the body (more justified, because he had tried to kill Apollo) when Apollo thought they were separating. Maybe it just wasn't clearly writtenSpoiler
aside from killing a troll and the people who have been feeding babies ot the troll--but that's at the end of the book.The sad thing is that I could have enjoyed this if the characters weren't lousy people. Okay, the book is slow to start. Some people said that it seemed like it switched genres. I think that was deliberately. If I'd cared about the characters, the slow start probably wouldn't have seemed slow. The ending would have redeemed any slowness.
This is a high 1, but I can't justify anything but a 1 star for a book that's okay with spousal abuse.
A strange and unexpected story that takes itself very seriously despite a plethora of ideas that are, on their face, a bit silly. The fantastical elements of The Changeling are embedded into much more grounded fears and traumas in a dance that's hard to keep up with and impressive the whole way through.
LaValle's core maneuver in this story is the blending of fable and folktale with the anxieties and ills of the modern world, and in every instance that it *could* be trite or overly clever, he balances it with a degree of strangeness, ambiguity, and dread that keeps the story moving and keeps its underlying ideas unsettling and untidy.
I found the ending to be a little bit too neat, but the story overall was such an enjoyable ride, so willfully defiant of expectation, that I couldn't help but love it. It's a difficult to book to pitch to someone, precisely because its meandering story is so much fun to discover as it happens; but it won me over by being periodically terrifying and delightfully mysterious all the way through.
LaValle's core maneuver in this story is the blending of fable and folktale with the anxieties and ills of the modern world, and in every instance that it *could* be trite or overly clever, he balances it with a degree of strangeness, ambiguity, and dread that keeps the story moving and keeps its underlying ideas unsettling and untidy.
I found the ending to be a little bit too neat, but the story overall was such an enjoyable ride, so willfully defiant of expectation, that I couldn't help but love it. It's a difficult to book to pitch to someone, precisely because its meandering story is so much fun to discover as it happens; but it won me over by being periodically terrifying and delightfully mysterious all the way through.