starts like love actually, then becomes rosemary's baby, then becomes jurassic park.

I think this book went over my head. I cannot be quite sure but I do think so. I had the overwhelming feeling of just missing something here – and I cannot quite put my finger on what that was. Bear that in mind while I try to figure out my thoughts while writing.In this book we follow Apollo and his wife both before they meet and after they have had their son. For about a third of the book, there is some menace lurking but mostly the story is whimsical and quite lovely, until suddenly it shifts...

DEADLINE reports a series order at AppleTV+ for this project!My Burgoine Review: I think this is a book you'll either love or hate within seconds. I loved it. If you're an urban-fantasy fancier, and are an admirer of Lovecraft Country or Ring Shout, this novel will give you another excellent experience. Much as I'd like to tell you a lot more, it's best experienced without prior knowledge.Look at these quotes pulled from the book. I think they're going to give you a great idea of what it's about...

Apollo Kagwa has abandonment issues. His mother Lillian, Ugandan by birth, has raised him alone since age four, when father Brian West vanished. For years, Apollo has had recurring dreams of a man knocking on the door and pushing his way into the apartment. He envisions being carried through a fog and wakes up screaming. Lillian is forced to leave Apollo alone for hours in order to keep the family afloat. Apollo, a self contained, bookish child is a voracious reader.Childhood entrepreneurial exp...

THE CHANGELING by Victor LaValle is so damn brilliant. Mash up of complex parental anxieties, life in Trumplandia, and dark fairy tales.

The difference between understanding what one sees and seeing what one’s understanding permits is central to psychological realism in fiction. For Victor LaValle, this difference can also be explained when our understanding is asked to cross the boundary between the real and the uncanny. His dark fable, The Changeling, is the story of Apollo Kagwa, a book dealer whose storybook romance with librarian Emma Valentine is devastated when Emma disappears after committing an unimaginable crime. His jo...

I decided to sit down and re-read this book a few months ago. So I made it a slow nightly process. And it's just as good as when I first picked it up a few years back. The author manages to tell a story so engrossing, you might forget that there's going to be magic, or the supernatural. And when it shows up, it's so powerful that you're left holding your breath. And where the story ends up going...beyond what you can even imagine.

Check out my video review!4.5 starsOkay. Wow. So. This was my first Victor LaValle book, and I feel like he's going to be on the same level as Neil Gaiman for me. I loved his writing style--DAMN LaValle knows his way around a sentence... Seriously. I think sometimes people conflate great prose with flowery prose, but that's not really the case. LaValle knows when to be flowery, when to be curt, when to be formal, when to throw in a curse word. He's a master, and a delight to read.As for this boo...

This is a story about the bad things that happen to parents who spam too much of their kids' lives on Facebook.I first discovered The Changeling on a list of "Dark fairytale books", a list which included several books I had already read and loved - but unfortunately this one just wasn't my cup of tea.Started out slowly introducing the characters and their backgrounds and relationships and I should be caring about them, shouldn't I? Yet they felt somehow dispassionate, hollow. I couldn't seem to

4.5 stars An excellent book that deftly melds the monsters of the old world with those of the new. LaValle's voice feels firmly a product of his time and place and it provides a rich multi-dimensional aspect to the characters and their story.The story itself is contemporary realism that slides into fantasy that slides into horror and circles back again. Real and fantasy horror combine in both subtle and sharp ways to create a violent and at times gory tale. Running throughout is an unavoidable s...

4ish stars.I was hesitant to read this because I didn't love the author's most recently written novella, The Ballad of Black Tom, but after a few key recommendations, I decided to pick it up. And I'm glad I did. I loved the characters and enjoyed LaValle's creepy, atmospheric, magical NYC. The first quarter of the book or so is really chill. We meet the characters, particularly married couple Apollo and Emma, who are cool and relatable, and who we grow to enjoy spending time with. There's some c...

4.5/5 stars!Apollo Kagwa grew up without a dad and now that he's a brand new father himself, he is determined to be there for every second of his son's life. Every second, that is, until his wife suddenly, crazily, gets it into her head that their baby is not their baby at all, but something else entirely. Apollo thinks she's out of her mind with lack of sleep and overwhelming responsibility, but is she really? If so, who keeps sending her pictures of their baby on her cell phone? Then again,

Reading this book felt exactly like turning the crank on one of those souvenir flatten-your-penny machines--you turn it over and over and over and over, with very little resistance, imagining all the time that it's what you wanted to be doing, and it feels like you're making no progress whatsoever, but you keep doing it anyway for what seems like forever and then, clunk, you're done--you just paid 26c and got back a penny that is no longer worth anything at all.

Spectacular! A modern fairy tale, but not the sweet kind, more of the sort the Brothers Grimm told, a fairy tale with all the gruesome bits left in. Apollo Kagwa is not your typical New Yorker; he's a self-made bookseller, with a love for and and a good nose for sniffing out rare books. His father abandoning him as a baby has made him determined to be a good father, so when he meets a wonderful, strong woman, Emma, an adventurous, strong-willed librarian and falls in love and they have a baby, h...

there's literally a bad guy who is named Kinder Garten and he's also an internet troll as well as the handler of an actual troll and I just don't understand novels any more

This is my second Victor LaValle and after the Ballad of Black Tom having washed through me and left me wanting so much more, I was very, very happy to be reading this. It has a very different feel in one way, but in another, it's exactly like coming home. Being in the story you always want to be in. What do I mean?The devil is in the details. It's very homey, feeling like delightful snapshots of family and home, full of the sweet and the bitter and the genuinely odd stuff that always comes alon...

The millennialest Millennial that ever millennially millennialed. LaValle manged to trick the world into buying three rough drafts of three unrelated stories that he couldn't be bothered to finish by pretending they were a single story. But hey, 75% of the way through, the third unrelated story SUDDENLY involves a heretofore-unmentioned supernatural element. Neither deep nor original nor complex, this is a shallow mess which feels more like the product of a first-year Creative Writing major than...

This intelligent, intriguing modern day fairy tale starts out in what seems to be a normal world. It begins with the birth of the protagonist, Apollo, a child of mixed race to Lillian Kagwa (a Ugandan immigrant) and Brian West (a white parole officer.) His father had held him as a baby telling him he was Apollo, the God. This becomes a mantra for Apollo later in life. Brian West disappears by the time Apollo is four years old, but Apollo continues to have dreams, or maybe nightmares, about his f...

Oh yes. That's what I'm talking about. This is the sort of book that reignites the passion for the genre. I've read LaValle's Devil in Silver, which I liked a lot, but this dark fairy tale for adults definitely takes the cake. And slaughters it. It starts off like many fairy tales do...nice and normal story of a man who realizes there's more to life than buying and selling books, proceeds to fall in love and start a family. Fatherhood agrees with him, all is dreamily well...until his perfect lif...

With THE CHANGELING, Victor Lavalle has given us a modern day urban fairy tale, complete with witches, Norse legends, and mayhem. But really at its heart, this novel is about families, and how our children are nurtured or neglected. It's about our memories of childhood, and what we believe or choose to believe is real. Sometimes the veil is very thin between the worlds of truth and illusion. There is also a strong current in this story of violation, which manifests itself in the potential loss o...