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A review by pinenoodle
The Changeling by Victor LaValle
1.0
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 I guess we are supposed to accept that she wasn't in her right mind because her kid had been replaced by a changeling, which was upsetting, but still nowhere near enough.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.