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A review by daja57
The Changeling by Victor LaValle
4.0
"A fairy tale moment, the old kind, when such stories were meant for adults, not kids." Set in New York, in which the magical buts up against the mundane. Apollo, seller of rare books, meets librarian Emma; they marry and have a baby called Brian. Then Emma starts to believe that they have a changeling, a creature from myth, not their own baby. Her dreadful reaction, followed by her disappearance, leads means Apollo must travel into mythic and magical realms (within New York) on a quest whose purpose shifts as we understand more of what is happening.
I thought the first half of the book was brilliant.
But it was rather like those horror movies in which the tension builds up until you see the monster, at which point it becomes too hard to suspend disbelief. The first half of the book crackled with mystery. The second half was a straightforward adventure story.
The highlight, apart from the episode in which Emma gives birth on a subway train with the help of four break-dancers, was the relationship between Apollo and Patrice "Usually they were the only two black book men at local estate sales. They might as well be two unicorns that happened into the same field. Of course they’d become close." There is a lot of insult trading as in the best buddy movies and Patrice has a fantastic way of anchoring their adventures in reality, such as when the two young men are seeking to break into a cemetery and Patrice points out that in this (white) neighbourhood the police often shoot first, ask questions later. "We can be heroes,’” Patrice said. “But heroes like us don’t get to make mistakes.”; "Some 'concerned citizen’s' anonymous phone call had killed many a black man before him."
But there were lots of fantastic authorial asides, reflecting on parenting, and the American way of life as seen by a black protagonist in New York City.
But in the end I was terrifically disappointed that a book which promised so much, for so long, dissipated its impact in a fantasy story.
I thought the first half of the book was brilliant.
But it was rather like those horror movies in which the tension builds up until you see the monster, at which point it becomes too hard to suspend disbelief. The first half of the book crackled with mystery. The second half was a straightforward adventure story.
The highlight, apart from the episode in which Emma gives birth on a subway train with the help of four break-dancers, was the relationship between Apollo and Patrice "Usually they were the only two black book men at local estate sales. They might as well be two unicorns that happened into the same field. Of course they’d become close." There is a lot of insult trading as in the best buddy movies and Patrice has a fantastic way of anchoring their adventures in reality, such as when the two young men are seeking to break into a cemetery and Patrice points out that in this (white) neighbourhood the police often shoot first, ask questions later. "We can be heroes,’” Patrice said. “But heroes like us don’t get to make mistakes.”; "Some 'concerned citizen’s' anonymous phone call had killed many a black man before him."
But there were lots of fantastic authorial asides, reflecting on parenting, and the American way of life as seen by a black protagonist in New York City.
But in the end I was terrifically disappointed that a book which promised so much, for so long, dissipated its impact in a fantasy story.