灰鷹巢城

Seven-year-old Henry Day is hoping to run away from his family and his mundane miseries when he's abducted by changelings and thrown into water in a kind of pagan baptism. Yeats celebrated these legendary, ageless woodland sprites, and Donohue updates their myth. "Ancients in wild children's bodies," the changelings re-name their captive Aniday and rear him to become a forest-stalker capable of resuscitating deer hit by the townsfolk's heedless drivers.

Meanwhile, another "boy" steals into Aniday's old bed; a changeling the Day family believes is their own Henry who'd been lost in a forest. In alternating chapters, Aniday and Henry spin a tale that's part metaphysical The Prince and the Pauper, part runic Trading Places. The former fairy, in elementary school, finds earthlings bizarre and uncouth; to him, they are "nose-pickers, thumbsuckers, snorers, ne'er-do-wells." The new "Henry Day" befriends his changeling hosts, but longs for books.

As the boys age, each seeks identity, but is haunted by memory -- Aniday, of his family and clean sheets, "Henry Day," of a life richer than the one he's living with his suburban hosts. Discovering in himself a prodigious talent as a pianist, he wonders about his previous existence. Something tells him that in the past he had been a genius musician.

Graced with telling period touches -- there are nods to The Jackie Gleason Show and the Kennedys -- the novel resurrects an America that now seems as exotic as Middle Earth.

Take that, Bilbo Baggins! Donohue's sparkling debut especially delights because, by surrounding his fantasy with real-world, humdrum detail, he makes magic believable."