The Stolen Child

Inspired by a W.B. Yeats poem in which fairies “tempt a child from home to the waters and the wild,” Keith Donohue’s 2006 novel, The Stolen Child, takes as its premise the idea that the legendary practice of replacing children with goblin changelings is alive and well in 1960s small-town America. After the switch happens early in the story, the novel follows the lives both of the boy forced to become one of the supernatural goblins and of the changeling who must masquerade as a human. They narrate the story in alternating chapters, often recounting the same events from two different perspectives as fate manages to throw them into close proximity with one another.

When he is seven years old, Henry Day is unhappy in his family, bothered by his melancholic father and preoccupied mother, and annoyed at always having to babysit his twin baby sisters. One summer night he makes vague plans to run away, not realizing that he has been the subject of careful surveillance by a group of goblins who are always on the lookout for a child who is “attuned to the weeping troubles of this world.” When he climbs into a hollow tree, the goblins launch their attack. Henry is tied up with cobwebs and vines and thrown into a river – a magical ceremony that transforms him into one of them. At the same time, the leader of the goblins undergoes a painful shapeshifting process to turn himself into a physical simulacrum of the boy. The original Henry is now a goblin named Aniday, while the changeling becomes Henry Day and curls up in the tree to wait until his parents find him. From here, while the book alternates the stories of Aniday and Henry Day, this summary will take each in turn.

Aniday learns more about his captors, who are at first glance a pack of feral children who hide in the wilderness and never age. But while they speak of a golden age when they were powerful magic fairies, now the beings no longer want to be associated with that name – they are goblins, “wretched creatures with hideous holes for eyes, bulbous heads on their ruined bodies.” When they aren’t scoping out children to steal, they use their preternatural speed and enhanced senses to stay unseen and to sometimes resuscitate deer hit by the heedless drivers. Each of the goblins was originally a child just like Aniday, stolen in their youth. The tribe has a “hierarchical queuing system of leadership: at each swap, it's the oldest changeling who becomes human,” which means most of them have to wait over 100 years before rejoining the world.



But not all the goblins are happy with this arrangement, especially when it means that in order for one of them to become human another child’s life has to be ruined. While Aniday is with the tribe, one leader commits suicide rather than have to turn a normal child into a changeling. Aniday grows into himself more and more, feeling out his new powers, and growing close to several members of the goblin tribe, especially a female named Speck. But at the same time, he clings to the memories he has of his former life and family. With Speck’s help, he is able to keep these shreds of connection alive. She gives him the gift of paper and pencil, tools which he uses to record his thoughts, experiences, and memories, formulating a new self from the things he discovers about himself while writing. Speck also helps Aniday find the public library, under which he builds a lair and which becomes his favorite place in the world.

Meanwhile, Henry Day tries to make the best of his newfound humanity, but at school his initial interactions with his peers make him hyper aware of them as unpleasant “nose-pickers, thumbsuckers, snorers, ne’er-do-wells.” He misses the larger scope of life outside the suburbs which is now lost to him.

Although he looks just like Henry, he is very much unlike him in personality – something which his father becomes concerned about. The main distinction between the new Henry Day and the boy he replaced is Henry’s extraordinary talent for playing the piano. The more Henry dazzles his family with his newfound skill, the more his father starts to suspect that this Henry isn’t his actual son. When his father confides his concerns about Henry being a changeling to his wife, however, she refuses to acknowledge the possibility – it is unclear exactly why. Henry Day’s father’s revelation about his son’s true nature makes him descend into a spiral of alcoholism and eventually suicide.



As Henry Day grows up, he starts to have memories not only of his time as a goblin, but also of another, older life – he seems to remember being a piano prodigy with a beloved German music teacher. Through his art form – music – Henry begins to obsessively work out what his actual self is. Who is he – the boy who was stolen? The decades-old goblin? The new man that he is becoming?

Henry Day becomes an accomplished pianist and composer, marries a loving woman named Tess, and has a son of his own, Eddie. He is haunted by the idea that his own son will be kidnapped and replaced by goblins, dreaming about this possibility. At the same time, he has figured out his original identity: he was a boy named Gustav Ungerland. Despite his angst, Henry feels unable to tell Tess anything about this. He can’t be truthful with her about his origins, and because of this, their relationship is too shallow to be satisfying.

Aniday and Henry Day live their lives hating each other, feeling trapped in a false life. Aniday eventually decides to leave the tribe and to live fulltime under the library. Nevertheless, he describes his woodland days as “the best years of my life." Henry Day, meanwhile, composes a magnum opus – a symphony called "The Stolen Child," with movements named “awareness, pursuit, lamentation and redemption."



The novel ends on an ambiguous note, after the two main characters finally confront one another. Henry finds Aniday in his book-lined lair. Then Aniday watches Henry perform his symphony, as they both are “trying to say goodbye, goodbye to the double life.” It is unclear whether either will end up with a life that is happier.