attackfish

I don’t usually buy books based on their cover art, but the cover for The Replacement by Brenna Yovanoff was so deliciously morbid with that skeletal branch, and those scissors and knives and things above the stroller. Besides, changeling fantasy tends to hit all of the right buttons for me. Plus, the store had it as an audiobook, so I could get my grandmother to pay for it.

Mackie Doyle is a replacement, left in place of a human child by his own kind. Sickly, and unsuited to the human world, he was never supposed to live long, but somehow he has. All he really wants to do is live his human life with his family and friends, and spend time with a girl he likes from his school, named Tate. But when her baby sister changes suddenly, just before she sickens and dies, the town of Gentry starts whispering about changelings and the people under the slag heap, and sometimes they do more than whisper.

The Replacement start slowly, building a sense of foreboding, and I kept listening, going, “uh huh, and the plot’s going to start when?” And even once it started, it was a fairly slow moving plot. It’s not the kind of book, Dear Readers, to read if you’re looking for edge of your seat adventure. It’s primarily a character drama and coming of age story for Mackie as he tries to find a place in a world he was never made for.

Part of the slowness is Mackie’s own fault. When Tate’s little sister dies, he wants to look away and ignore it, even as it takes Tate’s repeated demands and grief driven fury to drag him into doing the right thing. Tate could have so easily have been a plot device, but Yovanoff writes her raw grief and hopeless frustration to vividly and convincingly that I could feel it too.

The secondary characters in general, especially Tate, Carlina, and Mackie’s family are brilliantly drawn. Part of the reason he doesn’t want to look is because what happened to Tate’s sister is what happened to the real Malcolm Doyle, something Emma, Mackie’s sister still has deep feelings of guilt for. She’s the one who took down the iron scissors and odds and ends from above her baby brother’s crib. It’s her fault, she believes, that he was taken, and this other brother left in his place. She is devotedly in Mackie’s camp. He wasn’t her first brother, but he’s hers, and she’s keeping him. But she doesn’t agree with him about what’s best for him, and she pushes and pushes, and pushes, even while she tries to manage school and secrecy. Mackie’s mother, with her collection of secrets and fierce determination that some things are just not talked about, Mackie’s father with his insistence that Mackie get out and mingle, Carlina who has the ability to become something extraordinary on stage when she sings, but when she’s out in the town, just disappears, whose almost human way of looking at the world, her thoughts on being an outsider stood her apart from the other residents of Mayham, all of them feel like they have lives outside of Mackie, and when he leaves, they’re still there, and that’s harder to do with first person narration.

I don’t usually sit there and wonder whether the author of a book has disabilities or not, but Yovanoff’s detailed descriptions of Mackie’s reactions and the way people treat him with what is effectively an invisible disability, and the accommodations his family makes and the way they treat his condition (species?) really rang true for me. His family’s accommodations for him, the non-metal knives they use, the house stripped bare of anything that could harm him, is described in detail. His parents wish for him to be normal, or to at least appear normal rang true as well, as did Emma’s protectiveness, and even guilt. The combination of terrible luck to be sick in the first place combined with the truly phenomenal luck to have survived long enough to find treatment/survive to adulthood is a paradox I’m extremely familiar with. In fact, I’m unable to come up with any other reading of the story except that they are the family of a child with disabilities.

The Replacement is a very strange faerie novel. There are times when the focus on blood makes it seem almost like a vampire novel, but blood is full of iron, and it repulses Mackie, and makes him sick instead of attracting him. The blue girls are faerie zombies. The faeries are creepy, and not at all enticing the way they are in most stories, even the ones that play up the creep. They steal children to kill and leave their own dying children in their place, which is par for the course in changeling stories, but they also live underneath slag heaps, have mouths full of jagged teeth, or smell like rotting corpses. They’re both frightening and mundane.

In the end, The Replacement is a book about a small town and its residents, the outsiders like Mackie and Carlina, who aren’t outsiders at all but the insiders no one will acknowledge, the normal people like Tate, Roswell, and Mackie’s friends, and their secrets and deliberately forgotten history. It’s a twisted mirror of small town life, as accurate as it is distorted. There’s a similar sensibility to The Replacement as there is to Neil Gaiman’s books, especially American Gods. They share the same kind of creepy (though The Replacement is a toned down version, thank God) and Gentry is strongly reminiscent of Hinzelmann’s town. It too is a lucky little bubble of relative prosperity in the midst of failed company and industry towns, and it too is paying a price it didn’t agree to, or at least won’t admit to agreeing to.

Keven T. Collins’s reading voice is incredibly obnoxious, which did distract from my enjoyment of the book. It was even worse, because as a first person novel, I came to associate his voice with Mackie. Also, the format, with repeated sections at the the beginning of each new CD and creepy disk ending and beginning messages that you can’t delete without deleting part of the story makes them kind of hostile to ipod users. I strongly advise that anyone who wishes to read this book read the text version, if they can.

I don’t buy books based on their cover image all that often, but I’m glad this time I did.

Brenna Yovanoff can be found on livejournal at