JUNE 2017 - AudioFile
This strange story of magic and the macabre set in New York City is one of those audiobooks that ought to have been read by a professional narrator. The author’s narration of this sometimes exciting and mysterious fairy tale is mostly just that—a reading. He does inject some texture but not enough and not always appropriately. His pacing also falls short of optimal. In one memorable scene the protagonists are in the process of murdering a real villain with a mattock. At the same time, they’re carrying on a conversation with the obviously severely injured villain in a thoroughly normal manner. Everyone sounds like they’re sitting around the living room chatting rather than engaging in violence in the highly charged setting into which the author has cast them. M.C. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine
The New York Times Book Review - Terrence Rafferty
…strange and wonderful…As [LaValle's] Lovecraftian novella The Ballad of Black Tom showed just a year ago, he's not timid…about conjuring horrors or about describing the emotions they evoke in their unfortunate victims. His horrors hurt, and keep hurting for a good while after the worst seems to be over…In The Changeling LaValle does more than his share of truth-telling, about the anxieties and ambivalences of modern parenting, the psychological value of the stories we tell ourselves and our children, and the rigors of survival in urban America. Most of the characters in his rambunctious fairy-tale epic—both good and bad, and all descended from immigrants—pay an awfully steep price for a sense of safety in this country, this city, or their ancestors paid it, decades and centuries ago. "No one wants to learn their history," the evil old guy (a chilling variant on Poe's Man of the Crowd) tells Apollo. "Not all of it." This novel doesn't try to get quite all of it in, but it's rich in the ambiguous history of the New World metropolis that is its noisy, clamorous setting.
The New York Times - Jennifer Senior
One of the reasons to read Victor LaValle's novels is the simple sentence-by-sentence pleasure of them—they offer hundreds of baby dopamine hits, tiny baths for the prose snob's reward system. His imagination is unusually visual. His sensibility is so deadpan that it borders on a kind of derangement…The questions LaValle asks [in The Changeling] are hairy and urgent: How do we protect our children? Especially in the digital age?…Lavalle's observations about race remain, as ever, both stinging and mordantly funny…And his imagery is a source of immense satisfaction.
Publishers Weekly
04/10/2017
LaValle (The Ballad of Black Tom) displays his unique brand of trippy fabulism in his gripping latest, a modern-day fairy tale about a devoted father’s confrontation with evil. “The wildness had only begun,” says the narrator early on in the novel, a statement borne out by the eerie, fantastic events to come. The son of a Ugandan woman who raised him on her own, Apollo Kagwa scrapes together a living rummaging through estate sales for rare books. The novel takes its time warming up, somewhat leisurely describing Apollo courting, marrying, and having a baby with Emma Valentine, then becoming a so-called “New Dad”: a conscientious, diaper-changing, “emotionally available” modern man. Then the wildness begins with a staggering scene in which Apollo’s family is torn apart. In his quest to put himself and his family back together, Apollo, steered by a computer-savvy client interested in one of his rare books, journeys into New York City’s hidden enchanted places. There he encounters old magic, monsters, and wicked fathers. LaValle makes occasionally strained efforts to weave contemporary concerns—helicopter parenting, online oversharing, and Internet trolls—into this elemental fabric. Nonetheless, the novel works best when immersed in the violent, unpredictable realm of dark fairy tales, which, as one character tells Apollo, “are not for children.” (June)
From the Publisher
The combination of Grimm-ish allusion and social commentary might seem pat in the hands of less capable authors, but [Victor] LaValle executes the trick with style. . . . LaValle has written a story full of things to terrify not children but the parents who lose sleep worrying about how best to protect them.”—Time
“One of the reasons to read Victor LaValle’s novels is the simple sentence-by-sentence pleasure of them—they offer hundreds of baby dopamine hits, tiny baths for the prose snob’s reward system. . . . LaValle’s observations about race remain, as ever, both stinging and mordantly funny. . . . And his imagery is a source of immense satisfaction. . . . If monsters are your subject, writing like an angel helps.”—Jennifer Senior, The New York Times
“[A] bewitching masterpiece. . . . Like a woke Brothers Grimm, his clever new spin on the ages-old changeling myth is a modern fairy tale for the Trump era, taking on fatherhood, parenting, marriage, immigration, race and terrifying loss. . . . LaValle impressively maintains his storytelling momentum throughout The Changeling. . . . He not only recaptures the need for fairy tales but makes his essential reading as well.”—USA Today (four out of four stars)
“Victor LaValle’s fabulist ode to fatherhood and fairy tales offers a new take on themes as old as time. . . . Throughout western mythology, white men with swords have been the heroes while the rest of us watch, oohing and aahing, from the sidelines. With his genre-bending novel, The Changeling, Victor LaValle updates the epic narrative for the twenty-first century.”—O: The Oprah Magazine
“Fiercely defies categorization. Written as a self-proclaimed ‘fairy tale’ in a punchy, inviting style, Mr. LaValle’s haunting tale weaves a mesmerizing web around fatherhood, racism, horrific anxieties and even To Kill a Mockingbird. And the backdrop for this rich phantasmagoria? The boroughs of New York.”—Janet Maslin, The New York Times
“I was frequently startled by The Changeling’s piercingly beautiful insights into parenthood, childhood, [and] adulthood. . . . By turns enchanting, infuriating, horrifying, and heartbreaking, The Changeling is never less than completely engaging. . . . It’s a book that makes me want to seek people out to talk about it, to share together our own stories of reading it.”—NPR
“Fans of the macabre can’t miss the latest offering from prolific horror master Victor LaValle, which hurls us into the most harrowing abyss imaginable: parenthood. . . . Definitely scarier than anything you’ll hear around the campfire.”—Vulture
“This is a perfect summer horror read.”—Houston Chronicle
“Like a good Coen brothers film, this genre-defying, achingly literate phantasmagoria of a novel will work every nook and cranny of the imagination, taking the reader to places we’re either too afraid to visit or never knew existed.”—Paul Beatty, author of The Sellout
“Absolutely compelling, completely thrilling, The Changeling overflows with menace, wonder, and beauty.”—Kelly Link, author of Get in Trouble
