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aretz 's review for:
The Changeling
by Victor LaValle
This one just missed the mark for me. I don't think the infusion of Fairy Tale and modern day technology quite fused together for this one to be pulled off. The biggest problem is the writing. If you're going to write a fairy tale, your writing needs to be beautiful, but this was pretty basic. There was no real flourish to the style, only "He went here. He did this. This is a base description of what this place looks like."
The plot just took far too long to get anywhere and didn't give enough information. We went from "Apollo is having nightmares again", to Emma is getting chains, to immediately "That's not a child", and then to her poisoning Apollo, chaining him up, and hitting him with a hammer (and then seemingly killing her child). We missed most of the build of Emma's madness or what is actually the main core of the fairy tale. It was hidden far too much in the subterfuge of the mystery, and needlessly so. I spent most of the novel trying to figure out what in the world it was trying to be. I didn't actually get that it was supposed to be a fairy tale (not quite the uncanny or horror tale I was thinking it would be) and actually read a few of the reviews of this novel because it just didn't give me enough. I focused far too much on Apollo's father, which literally had nothing to add to this story. It was just distracting. I thought that his disappearance had some connection to what was happening to Apollo's son, but it had nothing. I don't quite understand how a photograph on the internet is akin to an invitation to take the child...I mean wouldn't a daguerreotype hold the same power then (logically speaking), but it sounds like it doesn't.
The bad individuals aren't introduced until far too long into the story.
The plot just took far too long to get anywhere and didn't give enough information. We went from "Apollo is having nightmares again", to Emma is getting chains, to immediately "That's not a child", and then to her poisoning Apollo, chaining him up, and hitting him with a hammer (and then seemingly killing her child). We missed most of the build of Emma's madness or what is actually the main core of the fairy tale. It was hidden far too much in the subterfuge of the mystery, and needlessly so. I spent most of the novel trying to figure out what in the world it was trying to be. I didn't actually get that it was supposed to be a fairy tale (not quite the uncanny or horror tale I was thinking it would be) and actually read a few of the reviews of this novel because it just didn't give me enough. I focused far too much on Apollo's father, which literally had nothing to add to this story. It was just distracting. I thought that his disappearance had some connection to what was happening to Apollo's son, but it had nothing. I don't quite understand how a photograph on the internet is akin to an invitation to take the child...I mean wouldn't a daguerreotype hold the same power then (logically speaking), but it sounds like it doesn't.
The bad individuals aren't introduced until far too long into the story.