This, along with The Egypt Game, is one my favorite Zilpha Keatley Snyder books. It's just a beautiful story about the changing friendship between two girls--Martha, who is painfully shy, and Ivy, the unique child of a nomadic family. This book made me want to stay age 11 forever, just to experience the freedom of childhood that these girls did.

If you've ever flirted with the possibility of taking on a reading challenge or a reading project (either self-imposed or group generated), I can't be enthusiastic enough in encouraging you to do so.My self-imposed “70 from the 70s” project (my third reading project in two years), that I started this past summer, has introduced me to three new writers who have quickly become “top 10” favorites of mine and has also opened the door to several handfuls of riveting “new” reads.Zilpha Keatley Snyder

read this just out of my teens, and loved it to pieces. My paperback is falling apart, alas, so I have not reread it for some twenty years. So I don't know how it holds up to my adult view, but the friendship, the approach to being different and creativity were impressive to me when young.

“Know all the Questions, but not the AnswersLook for the Different, instead of the SameNever Walk where there's room for RunningDon't do anything that can't be a Game” ― Zilpha Keatley Snyder, The ChangelingJust..one of the best. What a writer! The Changeling remains, along with "The Velvet room", another one by this author, one of my all time faves. Have you ever felt like a "Changeling"? Did you feel like when in childhood? Even for a moment? I think most of us have. In the case of Ivy and Mar...

It's too bad that it never got to the part about her being a changeling and it was only about the human side of things. Does anyone know which kind of faeries she was descended from?

A quickie from 1970, this YA book so beautifully depicts what a friendship between young and pre-teen girls looks like.

Just stumbled upon this book by accident, thank you, Goodreads! Have been trying to remember the title for the longest time! I read this several times in grade school, it fascinated me! Ivy Carson is from a, well, trashy family, but she herself is very different. She tells the mousy Martha who is her best friend that she is the daughter of the fairy queen, and has been switched with the real Ivy Carson. Ivy is a gifted but unschooled dancer, with wild black hair and capricious moods. She reminde...

I loved this book so much as a child and was a bit nervous to reread it, as many of my favorites have not held up well. But this did! I have zero qualms about passing to my own children and I hope they too will feel a sense of kinship with these girls.

The Book Gods sent THE CHANGELING to me at precisely the right time in life. I was a lonely little girl who loved to dream, hated sports, and cried easily. Not surprisingly, I was widely hated by my peers, and sought refuge in books. And while I loved being transported to magical places like Oz and Narnia, I was intensely aware that these books had little bearing on "real life." THE CHANGELING was different. It was about a young girl growing up in a status-conscious family. Her older brother and...

One of my all-time favorite books and a big influence on my *everything*.

I don't remember when I first read this book. I think I got it from the Scholastic Book Company when I was in second grade (1971 or 1972); we lived in a very rural area in northern New Mexico and my mother basically allowed me to order every book I wanted when the Scholastic catalog came. I know I then read it many, many times over the years that followed... and then, of course, at some point it got packed away with the rest of my "kid's books" and I haven't touched it in ages.But now, as it goe...

A quite lovely short novel from the 70s by a children’s writer I hadn’t heard of before. From the title I thought it would be fantasy, but it’s about the friendship between protagonist Martha, who comes from a middle-class family but feels like an outsider, and Ivy, who belongs to the town’s most notoriously wrong-side-of-the-tracks family. When the girls meet at age 7, they begin an intense friendship involving elaborate games of make-believe. Ivy declares she’s actually a changeling, and Marth...

Might be ZKS' best. It's certainly one of my favorites and certainly one of her most sophisticated. The girl friendship/coming of age theme is nothing new, but if ZKS had written for an adult audience, she could have been the Elena Ferrante of her time. ZKS creates that perfect blend of mostly realism, with just a whisper of magic. I would still love to join Martha and Ivy and the Tree People at Bent Oaks Grove. I had forgotten (or maybe my childhood self didn't quite get) just how funny young

Two very different girls share a secret place in the trees.(photo by Lisa Kimmell)

This is the book that first introduced me to Zilpha Keatley Snyder, who was my absolute favorite author as a kid. This book is not a fantasy, but it did inspire a fantasy series, the excellent Green Sky trilogy. Marty "the mouse" becomes friends with Ivy Carson, an unusual girl from a large and notorious family, who claims to be a changeling. I really can't do the book justice, but I think anyone who's felt like an outcast, or had a life-changing friendship (or wanted one) will love this book.

Chubby, mousy Martha's childhood best friend is Ivy, daughter from a no-good family who claims to be a changeling. This has an episodic structure that threatens to be overbearing: the adventures of two imaginative outsiders are charming, evocative, sympathetic, but also frivolous. It's the cumulative effect which matters more, and while Martha's arc is dated (fat reader surrogates are fantastic; fat reader surrogates who lose weight while gaining confidence is problematic) her emotional growth s...

Buddy read with Hilary, here's Hilary's Review (it's better than mine :D)It may not be obvious from title and the blurb, but this story is not Fantasy, nor Magical Realism. Even as a kid I was not much of a reader of realistic fiction, I preferred Fantasy stories. But there were a few exceptions, and I think this would have been one of them, if I'd read it as a young person. Since I've read books by this author before, including another that is realistic fiction, The Velvet Room (which was one o...

Writing a review for this treasured volume from my childhood seems impossible. Since first making the attempt, I have spent hours staring at the blank screen in front of me, have begun in a hundred different ways - "Some books aren't books at all, but mirrors..." / "Zilpha Keatley Snyder may not know it, but she wrote this book about me..." - but have always ended with the same admission of failure, with the same deletion of whatever facile comments I had typed, whatever little bits of text I ha...

Martha and Ivy are best friends. Can their friendship survive Ivy's frequent moves, Martha's judgmental Grandma and bullies at school? According to Ivy, magic might be just the solution.

This is a wonderful book, we were instantly drawn in to the story, the characters, the plot, the friendship, the imaginary games, all really appealed to us.Two seven year old girls meet and they are from contrasting backgrounds. Martha's family is highly respectable whereas Ivy's family have problems, mum drinks too much, brothers in jail etc. Ivy has an Aunt who sometimes looks after her when things get bad, she sounds lovely, but poor Martha, despite their outward show of respectability, her f...