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kaelaceleste 's review for:
The Changeling
by Victor LaValle
What a ride this one was. It started out seeming pretty normal, then goes a little off the rails, then jumps into an entirely different stratosphere about halfway through. Hard to describe this one - I guess I'd call it a realistic fantasy with horror elements. The fantasy stuff doesn't really come into play until maybe halfway through and then we kinda just run with it.
The Changeling starts off relatively tame, with a seemingly mundane story of a kid from NY, a little bit of his parents' backstory, and how he became a book collector and seller. I loved the way this part of the book was written - everything seems pretty normal but there's a hint of eerieness, of "something isn't quite right". This was a common thing throughout the book actually, there's a subtle feeling of dread that builds and builds all the way through that makes it a very creepy read.
Anyway this is the story of Apollo, a new father who faces an insane series of events leading to him searching for his wife and child, but everything is not what it seems. We follow Apollo's story as he travels between boroughs and worlds, slowly learning more and more about what's actually going on with his family.
The pacing of this book was a bit odd to me. We flew through certain scenes but others felt like they lasted forever(the subway birth for one...) . There were multiple parts that I thought were way further or earlier in the book than they actually turned out to be. When I got to the main...inciting incident, I guess you can call it - I thought I was a LOT further into the book than I actually was. I guess that's good, because it led me to keep reading to find out what was going to happen in the remaining 3/4 of the book.
The main thing keeping me from rating this higher though is how confused I got in the last 30%-ish. There was a lot I had a hard time following and I had a lot of unanswered questions (and googling tells me that others had the same problem lol). I mostly understood it all by the time I finished but it went a bit over my head.
Also, and I don't think this is necessarily a con - but I think this book would resonate a lot more for people with kids. It had a LOT of emphasis on like, doing anything for your kid and the impact of what it's like to be a parent and stuff like that. And like I said...that's not a bad thing. I just found that I couldn't relate to a lot of it myself.
Overall I really liked the writing style though, and will definitely pick up more of Victor LaValle's works. The audiobook is also narrated by the author and I loved it and would def recommend!
The Changeling starts off relatively tame, with a seemingly mundane story of a kid from NY, a little bit of his parents' backstory, and how he became a book collector and seller. I loved the way this part of the book was written - everything seems pretty normal but there's a hint of eerieness, of "something isn't quite right". This was a common thing throughout the book actually, there's a subtle feeling of dread that builds and builds all the way through that makes it a very creepy read.
Anyway this is the story of Apollo, a new father who faces an insane series of events leading to him searching for his wife and child, but everything is not what it seems. We follow Apollo's story as he travels between boroughs and worlds, slowly learning more and more about what's actually going on with his family.
The pacing of this book was a bit odd to me. We flew through certain scenes but others felt like they lasted forever
The main thing keeping me from rating this higher though is how confused I got in the last 30%-ish. There was a lot I had a hard time following and I had a lot of unanswered questions (and googling tells me that others had the same problem lol). I mostly understood it all by the time I finished but it went a bit over my head.
Also, and I don't think this is necessarily a con - but I think this book would resonate a lot more for people with kids. It had a LOT of emphasis on like, doing anything for your kid and the impact of what it's like to be a parent and stuff like that. And like I said...that's not a bad thing. I just found that I couldn't relate to a lot of it myself.
Overall I really liked the writing style though, and will definitely pick up more of Victor LaValle's works. The audiobook is also narrated by the author and I loved it and would def recommend!