Flashback Friday is a weekly tradition started here at Bookshelf Fantasies, focusing on showing some love for the older books in our lives and on our shelves. If you’d like to join in, just pick a book published at least five years ago, post your Flashback Friday pick on your blog, and let us all know about that special book from your reading past and why it matters to you. Don’t forget to link up!

My Flashback Friday pick this week:

The Stolen Child by Keith Donohue
(published 2006)

Synopsis (Goodreads):

“I am a changeling-a word that describes within its own name what we are bound and intended to do. We kidnap a human child and replace him or her with one of our own. . . .”

The double story of Henry Day begins in 1949, when he is kidnapped at age seven by a band of wild childlike beings who live in an ancient, secret community in the forest. The changelings rename their captive Aniday and he becomes, like them, unaging and stuck in time. They leave one of their own to take his place, an imposter who must try — with varying success — to hide his true identity from the Day family. As the changeling Henry grows up, he is haunted by glimpses of his lost double and by vague memories of his own childhood a century earlier. Narrated in turns by Henry and Aniday, The Stolen Child follows them as their lives converge, driven by their obsessive search for who they were before they changed places in the world. Moving from a realistic setting in small-town America deep into the forest of humankind’s most basic desires and fears, this remarkable novel is a haunting fable about identity and the illusory innocence of childhood.

This beautiful, haunting book is both fairy tale and a story of disillusioned adulthood, drawing on the myth of the changeling to follow two characters who feel isolated and alienated in their lives. It’s a sad look back at the lost days of youth, with a fantastical twist serving to explain why a man might feel so strange in his own life, always feeling like there’s a part of himself missing.

The Stolen Child is really quite lovely to read. I’ve seen it described as a fairy story for adults, which sounds just about right to me. I’d put it on my shelf right next to Graham Joyce’s Some Kind of Fairy Tale, which also conveys the sense of unfulfilled purpose and a lost life while dwelling in realms both mortal and magical.

I’ve yet to read Keith Donohue’s two subsequent novels, but both (Angels of Destruction and Centuries of June) sound like books that are right up my alley.

What flashback book is on your mind this week?

Note from your friendly Bookshelf Fantasies host: To join in the Flashback Friday fun:

• Grab the Flashback Friday button
• Post your own Flashback Friday entry on your blog (and mention Bookshelf Fantasies as the host of the meme, if you please!)
  
• Leave your link in the comments below
  
• Check out other FF posts… and discover some terrific hidden gems to add to your TBR piles!

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