The Replacement by Brenna Yovanoff; young adult, dark fantasy; 352 pages
I picked this up because the cover caught my eye; happily, this is one of those books where the cover really captures the tone of the book: bleak, ominous, and eerie. The story is an old one, with a twist: Mackie Doyle vanished when he was a baby, only to be replaced with a changeling. But the changeling didn't sicken and die--it survived, and grew to be the Mackie Doyle of our story. Mackie knows he's not human, but he's never known another life, and he's not so sure that his own people are any better than the people of his town (what do they do with all those stolen children, anyway?). I loved Mackie's voice, and the grimy, decaying industrial town in which the story is set. The constant rain and barren gravel pits, combined with ancient superstition, gives the book a very surreal feel. I have to recommend this to fans of Holly Black's Tithe and Keith Donohue's Stolen Child.
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