“The Changeling” starts out slowly. Apollo Kagwa is the son
of a hard working nurse and a father who abandoned them when Apollo was four.
When Apollo meets Emma Valentine at the library, and they get married and she
gets pregnant, he vows he will be a father who gets it right. He’ll be there
for his child, an attentive and loving father. He changes, bathes, and feeds
his son Brian. He takes him to the park and takes tons of pictures of Brian,
and uploads every one of them to Facebook. It never occurs to him that this
could attract the wrong kind of attention.
Since he was young, Apollo has been making money by buying
and selling old books. He does okay; he and his wife have been able to buy an
apartment. But while it pays the bills, he’s never had a big find, the kind of
find that would give them a cushion. This changes when he finds a first edition
of “To Kill a Mockingbird”- inscribed by the author to Truman Capote. This
could be the break he’s been looking for. He involves his best friend, Patrice,
a fellow book man, who is war veteran and cyber genius.
But disaster is around the corner. Emma seems to have
contracted postpartum depression, claiming that Brian is not their son anymore,
that he’s been taken. She performs a horrific act that lands Apollo in the
hospital, and vanishes. Thus begins a quest of revenge.
This story combines cyber stalking and Old World fairy
tales; it’s horror, urban fantasy, and ‘regular’ fantasy all put together. It
portrays the dangers of internet oversharing, trolls, and being a person of
color on the streets at night. But the heart of the story is how love will make
a parent go to any lengths to save their child. The story might have started
slowly, but it built up steam fairly quickly and sucked me totally in. It’s an
edge of the chair read, impossible to stop reading. You cannot predict what
will happen next – there are so many strands of story- and I enjoyed the
characters.
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I received this book free from the Amazon Vine program, in return for an unbiased review.
Neither of these things influenced my review.
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