The Changeling
Aug. 17th, 2025 01:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alobearThe Changeling by Victor LaValle is very much a book of two halves.
The first half is about a couple having a baby. It's richly descriptive, very involving and a realistic, in-depth exploration of a relationship and how it changes over time. The level of detail about individual actions is perhaps a bit much sometimes, but overall it didn't bother me - and made the whole thing more unsettling when things started to go awry.
But it very much went off the rails by the end, unfortunately, and ultimately contravened one of its own main tenets. Some interesting ideas and largely well written, but very unpleasant in a few places and the end section really let it down in my view.
The first half is about a couple having a baby. It's richly descriptive, very involving and a realistic, in-depth exploration of a relationship and how it changes over time. The level of detail about individual actions is perhaps a bit much sometimes, but overall it didn't bother me - and made the whole thing more unsettling when things started to go awry.
But it very much went off the rails by the end, unfortunately, and ultimately contravened one of its own main tenets. Some interesting ideas and largely well written, but very unpleasant in a few places and the end section really let it down in my view.
