Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

The Changeling is a standalone fantasy novel. Maybe it would qualify as horror. This didn’t trigger any chills for me, but I could see where one might find it creepy. This is one of the books where it’s difficult to give a spoiler-free hint of what the story is about because it builds up slowly and the main plot doesn’t kick in right away. So I’m not really going to try, especially because I thought the title itself gave too much of the plot away as it was. I’ll just say that at its heart I think this is a story about struggling families and the mistakes parents make.

This story held my attention well and I enjoyed reading it. I do wish the book had been given a less obvious title. It would have been more puzzling and mysterious that way which, at least for me, would have increased my enjoyment. It might have been scarier with that mystery left in-tact also. I knew what was going on long, long before it was explicitly revealed. There were a few twists and turns with how things were resolved and who was responsible for what that I did enjoy, though.

I thought there were a lot of little things throughout the book that didn’t make sense, or lacked sufficient explanation. I’ll list some of the ones that bugged me the most in spoiler tags:
(view spoiler)[
* Why did Emma hit Apollo with the hammer? I can kind of explain this one as her being half out of her mind with all the craziness going on and feeling like she was alone with it all, and maybe she panicked when Apollo was trying so hard to escape. But at the very least this should have come up when they were reunited. “Oh, by the way, I’m sorry I tried to bash your head in.�

* Why did Kinder Garten send all those pictures to Emma of Brian? That seems like a big part of what initially tipped her off that something wasn’t right, so why would he have risked it when there didn’t seem to be any benefit in it? Kinder Garten’s main motivation seemed to be success/money, not necessarily a desire to terrorize just for the “fun� of it.

* How the heck did Apollo carry a serving plate with a sheep’s head covered with a domed lid balanced on top of a suitcase that he was dragging around the city? The suitcase I’d been picturing up to that point was way too small to fit something like that on top of it, but even if it was an enormous suitcase, you can’t balance something unstable on top of a suitcase and traipse around expecting it to stay put, not even on a smooth airport floor, much less on uneven sidewalks, asphalt when crossing streets, etc. This is such a small thing, but I swear I spent 5 minutes ranting and raving about it in my head before I could manage to move on from that paragraph.

* Why was Apollo’s mom so insistent that Apollo go see the grave of his son when she didn’t appear to have any knowledge about what was going on?

* How did that many women and children support themselves on that island and never leave traces that would have resulted in their discovery by officials? Especially if many of the women had similarly killed their “children� and were wanted by the police?

* Apollo’s mother doesn’t outright say it, but she strongly hints that she killed his father when he tried to drown Apollo. But if so, who left the box of mementos for him to find when he was older? It clearly wasn’t his mother based on her reaction. And yet she still seemed confident he was dead (or “where she left him�) when she finally told Apollo the real story near the end of the book?

* It seemed like there might have been other trolls around since they said “the big one can swim�, implying that maybe there were smaller trolls and/or trolls that couldn’t swim? If so, the root cause hasn’t really been resolved. If there was only one troll, then why was another baby apparently stolen while Brian was still alive? I’m referring to the child of that lady in the church at Apollo’s therapy session who was saying similar things about her own “child� to what Emma had said, implying her child had also been stolen. And that child wasn’t found at the cave with Brian.

* How could anybody think an app could enable an iPad or other device to output light truly as bright as the sun? (hide spoiler)]

Oops, that list kept growing the more I typed. :) I’m rating this at 3.5 stars but rounding down to 3 on Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ. I’d actually enjoyed this enough while reading that I was originally thinking I’d round up to 4, but I decided to round down to 3 after typing up that list. When too many things don’t make sense, I start to get the impression that the author didn’t have the answers either and just wrote things that would create the atmosphere they wanted and/or drive their plot where it needed to go. I prefer a writing style where the author puts more effort into making sure everything can fit together by the end, even if they might not explain every last detail.