Changeling, by Delia Sherman

[lady_schrapnell]

Happy holidays - very belated in some cases - to all who are or have recently been celebrating them!

As I think I've done at least a good chunk of the backlog of read-and-not-mentioned-here books, I'll move on to one I just finished recently - and would have written about before, had I not got caught up in Philip Reeve's Here Lies Arthur, about which more - probably much more - soon.

Michele kindly lent me her copy of Changeling (an ARC), which I'd wanted to read after very much enjoying 'CATNYP' in The Faery Reel, and I'm so glad I got a chance to read it - as it was at the time only available in hardcover from the States, I might have let it join the enormous (and growing with every blog-reading day that passes) pile of books I'd like to get my hands on at some point. For a number of those, the 'some point' may end up being in the Great Library of the Afterlife. (There, at least, every book will be published in every country at the same time, so that might not be a totally bad thing.)


Anyway, Changeling. Well, for starters, the perhaps missable depth of the book can be discerned in the title, because there are two changelings, Neef, the narrator (and the mortal changeling of Central Park) and Jennifer Goldhirsch, renamed Changeling by Neef, who knows the rules of the Folk. Changeling's the fairy changeling who was left with Neef's parents as an infant, and hasn't faded away as they sometimes do, but is growing up apparently mortal. I'll come back to this. Neef lives in Central Park, but Central Park Between, under the protection of its Genius, The Green Lady. Her godmother Astris (a white rat) and her godfather (the Pooka) teach her Folk lore and the rules of survival and she goes off to the Metropolitan Museum to learn art and mortal languages, and there's no apparent reason any of this should change, until she breaks a geas laid on her by the Green Lady at her 'Changing', about which she's never been told. The Lady removes her protection and declares all the paths of the Park closed to her. Neef is rescued from the Wild Hunt (by a tengu, or Japanese mountain spirit, for purposes very much of his own) and meets up with Changeling, before undertaking a challenge - win three treasures for the Lady and get back the freedom of the Park and protection. It's quite a set of difficult tasks, obviously.

I think this book could be read as just a very enjoyable quest adventure fantasy, and it would be much fun that way. A quick summary of the plot might even make it sound as if it were rather standard version of same - especially if you're not a fan of the inverted/fractured fairy tale book (as at least one person reading this is not!) I thought the versions of fairy tales told by the Folk were a lot of fun in this case, and also enjoyed the very unique voices of the different New York City Geniuses. But two things made it much more than just a fun and fluffy ride for me.

First, the sheer depth of folk and fairy tale, lore, and legend incorporated is very impressive. Some of them have been mentioned already: the Green Lady, Pooka, Wild Hunt, and tengu are just a small sampling, as there are mermaids, Krakens, selkies, the sandman, and vampires with a difference, among many others. There's a glossary in the back for the less familiar ones, which is very funny too. It never seems laundry-listy though, nor are folk characters just stuffed straight in without being fit for the purpose. (The tengu's a nice example: the country mountain spirits take their names from their mountain residences, while City ones take theirs from their building. 'Carlyle lived in the golden spire on top of the Carlyle Hotel. He'd modeled his nest on a traditional Japanese room...') And this is without even mentioning the many non-folk/fairy-tale/legend allusions, which are also wonderful. (Eloise Awards for the Most Spoiled Child, for example.)

Second, and perhaps more winningly even for me, is the shading of the whole adventure story by the depiction of the two changelings. Neef is a mortal, without magic, brought up by and living with, Folk. Her attitudes are shaped by them to a huge extent, but it's easy to sense the underlying loneliness of being an outsider, accepted by many only because it's 'tradition' for Central Park, though obviously loved by a few close to her. She's very likable, if sometimes - understandably - not as understanding as she might be. Changeling - well, Changeling is interesting in a different way. She doesn't know that she's not really mortal, although she's no longer truly fairy either, as, for example, she's said to be going to age. As well as that, she's pretty easy to spot as having Asperger's (even without the note in the acknowledgments), although children might just see her as socially awkward and super-geeky. Neef's almost constantly irritated with her for not knowing how to behave in New York Between, and her relative slowness at adapting endangers them several times. This is an interesting device, because Neef has been prepared all her life for being the hero on a quest, and our identification with her is always tempered by an appreciation of how utterly terrifying being plonked all unprepared in the middle of a real fairy tale adventure would be for Changeling. Especially with the rather rigid patterns Changeling needs to make herself feel safe even in her own familiar world.

I read just a few reviews of this, and Fuse # 8 raised an objection to the equating of a child with Asperger's Syndrome and changelings. (Fourth paragraph in the review.) I've been mulling this point over for a few days now, and can't come up with a much better conclusion than the feeling that it doesn't seem to me an equation really, any more than Neef's occasional crashing lack of sympathy is equated with her being a mortal - they're both such unique characters in such unique and adaptation-requiring situations, that I didn't feel tempted to read anything more into it. But it's not a great argument, I freely admit!