The Replacement

Mackie is a changeling, a fairy child left as a replacement for a human one. Instead of dying as such a child is expected to do, he survived by making himself invisible and avoiding contact with iron that infuses just about everything, from steel to human blood. All he wants is to be human, to fit in with the people of Gentry, but when a little girl goes missing, he finds himself journeying into the town's underworld to meet the creatures that once abandoned him.

I fell for this book as soon as I saw it's uber-creepy book cover, featuring a litany of knifes, scissors, and horseshoes dangling precariously over a child's carriage.



I loved it even more when I found out the purpose of those dangerous objects is to protect rather than harm, show more each of them made with iron to save the child from being taken — which is a perfect reflection of the world that lies within this books pages. What at first appears ugly and dangerous may turn out to be good and kind. What appears beautiful may be deadly. And I love that reversal of expectations.

I love that Mackie is a member of the family, even though his mom, dad, and sister know he is not the same human boy who was robbed from the crib that night. They know, and yet he is accepted and loved. They do all they can to accommodate his disabilities (removing all the iron they can from the house, building an unconsecrated part of church so he can go to Sunday school) and protect him from the potential malice of the town (which refuses to admit the existence strange creatures, even though deep down they know).

Mackie, for all this love, is lost and lonely. Though he has friends and family who care for him, he casts himself as an outsider, feeling that often come up for adopted children in general. When Tate comes after him for answers, for someone anyone to listen to her about her sister, he tries to avoid her in an effort to protect himself, but finds himself unable to pretend that he doesn't care.

There is a general creepiness and sense of unease that fits perfectly with the book cover, and the hairs on my arms are standing up right now — partly from the creep factor, partly from delight — even as I think about it. If it's half as good as this one, then I can't wait to read another Brenna Yovanoff book. show less

I’m not going to lie and say The Replacement wasn’t creepy. In fact, it sneaked up and toed the line of my own creepiness threshold pretty regularly. The whole novel had a Tim Burton feel to it, and if they ever do a movie adaptation, I hope he directs it. I found myself imagining many scenes as something out of his weirder movies.

But what kept me going was that underneath the layer of bizarrity (new word) was a warm, fuzzy sort of truth of the very best kind that made the ghastly creatures and events less horrifying. For being such a strange, dark book, The Replacement has a pretty nice message tucked into its deepest corners.

My full review is posted on my blog, Erin Reads.

The story: 16-tear-old Mackie Doyle gets sick at the sight of blood. It's shameful and embarrassing, but worse than that is the fact that he can't touch iron or step on consecrated ground. These are not just inconveniences for Mackie. They are the signs that he is a Replacement, a changeling child placed in the cradle when the human child is stolen. Now a girl at Mackie's school, fierce little Tate, has lost her beloved sister Natalie in the same way. Tate is not letting her sister go without a fight, and she thinks Mackie can help her. Mackie is dying in the human world, and he is pretty sure he can't even help himself.

I loved this book so much that my whole review could be just READ IT, but I did want to say something else, something show more I thought of when I became immersed in the non-human world Yovanoff creates in The Replacement. Why do we read books about (you should excuse the expression) Faerie? Fairies aren't real, so when we read these books, and they resonate with us, we are clearly reading about something that IS real. And I think we are actually reading about classes: especially, people who live at the margins of our pleasant society, people who both support it and subvert it, people who are invisible to most of us, and who, when they become visible, are usually visible as horrors. And that is something worth thinking about...when you read The Replacement. Which you absolutely should. show less

Mackie is a changeling who, but all accounts, shouldn’t have survived infancy, but he’s now in high school, living in a small town in which children frequently are stolen and the townspeople mostly suffer in silence, except when they can find a good scapegoat to take their sorrows and frustrations out on. Mackie’s family know what he is but have chosen to love him despite the idea that he was left in place of their actual child/brother, and they help him live his life in such a way that will keep him under the town’s radar. But despite all that, Mackie’s intolerance of iron and his ability to live in the ‘normal’ world are getting worse. If he doesn’t figure out something soon, he’ll die. And then the little sister of show more one of his classmates dies, or rather, the changeling that has been put in her place dies, and Mackie has to decide if he can go on living the half-life he has or if he will face his origins and try to save the town.

A perfect balance of creepy and tender, with excellent characters and equally great writing. Definitely recommended. show less

this was so good! SO GOOD! the story was original and very frank, the characters were grumpy realistic teenagers, and everything that was meant to seem creepy was creepy as helllllllllllllllllllll. AMAZING. SO AMAZING! Roswell, BE MINE.


however, needed way, way more kissing. and dudes kissing. you'll know what I mean.

Yovanoff weaves a fantastic tale here about the darker side of what we often think of as faeries but could well also be called demons, gods, or any number of things. That, actually, is part of the point of the novel, mixed and mingled with philosophy about belief being what gives these creatures any power to begin with, no matter what they're called. It's an interesting take on mythology and how it plays in the modern world, and I liked it!

Stylistically, Yovanoff's got some distinction here. I've read some YA novels that could have been written by anybody, for all that their style stood out. This, I'm happy to say, was not one of those books. She plays with stream-of-consciousness, with nonstandard descriptors, and with a slightly show more depressive feeling that suits the plot and the character of the book quite well.

I also loved how the darker secrets of the town were not really secrets. Everyone knew about them, but the code of silence kept anyone from speaking out or doing anything. I was expecting that people would just be rationalizing everything away, that nobody would guess anything's that odd about Mackie or the death of Tate's sister, but no, that wasn't the case. People knew, and they averted their eyes because things were as they had always been, and that was just how it was. Whether they complained about it or believed it really was for the best, it still was.

That whole situation was underscored by an exchange near the end of the novel, when Mackie asks if, after the demise of the Lady, the town would cease to be as good as it had been. He's asked in return if it was ever good, at least in his memory. Simple lines, simple questions, but with a powerful meaning behind them, and that is the essence of what makes Yovanoff so damn good at this! She knows how to condense complicated issues into poignant questions and observations that make you think about them instead of just telling a story that leads you along by the hands and gives you convenient recaps along the way. You've got to have a good understanding of subtleties, of philosophy and the nature of existence and mythology and psychology to appreciate all of the little twists and turns and questions that come up over the course of the 300+ pages.

This is definitely a book worth recommending. If darker intelligent YA urban fantasy is your thing, then definitely grab a copy of The Replacement, and be prepared for something that will leave you a little bit sadder, wiser, and older when it's all said and done. show less

3.5 stars -- Here is my too-long review after probably overthinking this book a bit. Sometimes the overthinking is hard to avoid.

Everybody knows something in Gentry is wrong, but like his neighbors and parents, Mackie is willing to ignore the strangeness until several things happen to force his attention: Tate, a classmate, comes to him for help because she is sure that her baby sister, who just died, wasn�Ûªt really her baby sister; he meets a mysterious stranger who tells Mackie something he‰Ûªs suspected for quite a while, that he‰Ûªs a Replacement and he's slowly but surely dying from iron exposure; and his sister Emma, also aware of how ill he‰Ûªs become, makes a deal with one of the fey to help him show more and puts herself at risk. Mackie's only hope is to investigate his past, which leads him to become involved with the fey, who offer him medicine to keep him alive -- as long as he helps them keep sway over the town, by joining the band Rasputin and beguiling the humans with song, and by turning a blind eye to the whole sacrificing babies thing, like they do.

The dark side of the fey, or faeries, whatever you want to call them (Yovanoff resists naming them, so I am just going to call them "the fey" because it's a good blanket term) is well-mined territory in YA literature; finding a new take on them is a challenge, and I think Yovanoff succeeds in doing so. This debut novel creates its own mythology of changelings and the underground world where the fey live, while still using many common folkloric tropes. Discovering the dark, moody town of Gentry and their unnatural patrons is what kept me reading, even when I was semi-annoyed with suspect character motivations or the rushed ending. While I hesitate to call this a horror novel, because it‰Ûªs not nearly scary or disturbing enough, it has horror undertones that make for a nice contrast with the current crop of more romantic paranormal YA books.

Here, at least, the fey and their world are not seductive: while they can appear beautiful (some of them, anyway), it‰Ûªs not their natural state, and when they pass among humans, they disturb more than entice. The fey in this book are mostly creepy: some of them are revenants (the ‰ÛÏblue girls‰Û), and the alive ones appear almost human, but there‰Ûªs always something off, like a mouth full of needle-sharp teeth, or red-rimmed eyes and lashes crusted with sickly yellow gunk. Even Mackie, the Replacement (changeling) who survived against all odds, is described as not being quite right -- he's too pale, too hollow-cheeked, and his eyes are too black (never mind the inconsistency that this supposed "ugly" boy seems to fit in so well at school one minute and then stand out as a freak the next, depending on what's convenient to the story). Humans aren‰Ûªt swooning around the fey in sexual stupor, basically, which is refreshing in a genre that is overfull of super-hot, super-fly supernatural creatures. The fey don't seem to be all that powerful on their own, and it's obvious that they are struggling to survive, a species on the brink of dying out.

The two warring sisters who rule the fey, the Morrigan (in the form of a little girl) and the Lady (in the form of a beautiful woman), live underneath a slag heap and a dump hill respectively, and though their homes are grand and cavernous, they're also filled with disturbing things, like an insane revenant girl floating in a pool, or collections of pinned butterflies and stuffed birds. Despite their shared creepiness, the Morrigan and the Lady have different agendas for ensuring their hold over the town stays strong: the Morrigan sends up her musicians (posed as a rock band Rasputin) to make the town adore them, but that's not enough for the Lady, who needs blood sacrifice of the town's children. While the Morrigan disagrees with her sister's methods, she's unwilling to put herself and her people at risk to stop her, so instead she turns a blind eye, much like the humans in Gentry.

The relationship the fey have with the town of Gentry is parasitic at best: while both prosper whenever the bond between them is renewed, the times have changed so much over the centuries that even the sacrifices have lost some impact. Nobody's really prospering anymore; they're enduring instead, and none of them seem truly happy. The town is just as complicit in this relationship as the fey are. Every seven years a human baby disappears with a sickly fey baby left in its place, and nobody does anything. They wait for the fey baby to die, as it invariably does in its new inhospitable environment, and the family buries this replacement baby as if it were their own, even though they know it isn't. It's a culture of fear and silence and secret ritual, where parents hang scissors and other metal implements over their babies‰Ûª beds in the hopes of keeping the fey away. An interesting exercise for me was wondering how many of the townspeople accept this on a conscious level -- knowing that this is what it takes to honor the deal -- and how many just go along with it because it's the way it's always been, without allowing themselves to make the disturbing connections.

This makes Mackie's relationship with the town, and with his family and friends, particularly interesting, as he‰Ûªs one of the only Replacements to grow up. Up front, no one seems to know that he isn‰Ûªt anything other than what he pretends to be: Mackie Doyle. At first, he doesn‰Ûªt even know he‰Ûªs a Replacement, at least not consciously, but he feels there‰Ûªs something secret going on that he‰Ûªs involved in without understanding what it is. He feels as if the whole town is in on it, but at the same time, that the town doesn‰Ûªt know about him . . . yet. He worries that eventually he'll do something wrong, something to make his unnaturalness stick out, and the town will take retribution, conveniently making him a scapegoat for their own ignorance and complicity. (There's even a very interesting local legend about such a man, who lived among townspeople for years but was eventually blamed for all of the children's deaths in his time and murdered, that Mackie worries will parallel his own fate.)

This immediately makes Mackie a sympathetic character, for me. He doesn't really want to know what's going on. He'd like to just pretend he's normal, but he worries that eventually the fiction will come crashing down when he least suspects it, and he'll be at the mercy of an angry mob. I think that fear motivates him more than anything else in the book; while he eventually comes to care about Tate and her baby sister, Mackie goes after the Lady who's killing children because he's afraid of what will happen if he doesn't. Even when he keeps talking about "what's right" (as in "it isn't right to kill babies just so you can be powerful"), and he has a world's worth of moral outrage on his side, I still think it's motivated a little more by desires to save himself. That's just my take on his character, though; I'm not sure it's intended.

Mackie's parents and sister were interesting side characters, the only side characters I think behave totally consistently. Mackie's parents have adjusted their household to his ‰ÛÏallergies‰Û to iron and concocted lots of cover stories for his aversion to blood and consecrated ground (event though his father is a pastor), but they never discuss the reasons for them. It‰Ûªs so taboo that it‰Ûªs clear they know a lot more than they let on, and one of the things I found most interesting to contemplate is whether his parents have grown to love Mackie for who he is or whether they are merely making the best of a bad situation by refusing to admit he isn't really their son. It adds a whole layer to the idea that you are supposed to love and trust your family, no matter what. Once you find out more about his mother and her childhood as a "pet" underground with the Lady, it's even more interesting -- Mackie is one of the very creatures she loathes, and yet, he's her son.

His sister Emma, on the other hand, clearly does know and in fact remembers the night the original Mackie was taken (while the replacement baby starts off looking like the original, the glamour wears off quickly, leaving a sickly, monstrous baby with sharp teeth behind). Despite knowing the truth, though, Emma is unwavering in her loyalty and devotion to Mackie, who has been her brother long enough to be the only one she really remembers. Her unconditional love has sustained him over the years and is the main reason Mackie has survived as long as he has. Emma may come off as a little too perfect, but I liked her relationship with Mackie and how it contrasted with everyone else's; she has a big heart, she's nonjudgmental (she recognizes, like Mackie does, that not all the fey are monsters; some are just victims of circumstance, like the humans), and she doesn't shy away from the truth.

Mackie's friends, on the other hand, are a weird, uncertain force in the book. His three closest friends are described in such an odd way that it seems like they know more than he does, particularly his best friend Roswell, who comes across as quite cagey. Tate seems to also know something, given that she seeks out Mackie for help when her baby sister is Replaced (Why else would she go to the weird guy she's never spoken to before? Why would she keep pestering him even when he said he didn't know what she's talking about?), but what she knows is never made certain. She looks to Mackie for proof that her baby sister is still alive, and seems sure that he will get it. I didn't really get where their romance came from -- it seems more of a product of convenience rather than actual feelings (they're working together on something dangerous, so they become too interested in each other), but it also feels like something just for the YA market, where there has to be a romance, even when it doesn't really fit. This book would have been fine without a love interest for Mackie; better, I would argue.

When Mackie finally "comes out" to his friends, they all accept the news with such ease that I‰Ûªm still not sure if I was supposed to assume they already knew, or if that's just poor characterization, so that Mackie doesn't have to deal with any extra (but more realistic) drama just when he needs a support system the most. I suspect it's the latter in most cases, but I could be charitable, since one of the whole points of this book is that everybody knows Gentry has a dark secret they refuse to talk about, so some details are left for Mackie to figure out on his own. Still, his friends all eagerly agree to storm the Lady's underground home and kidnap back Tate's baby sister two seconds after learning about the town's bloody history and without having much of a plan for how to get back out once they get in. They are so willing, and so supportive, it feels like there was a shortcut in there, like we went right to the top of the skyscraper without bothering to check the foundation because, if you can get to the top of the skyscraper, well the foundation must be there, right?

Not in fiction, baby.

Of course their plan fails miserably, but they still win, thanks to a couple plot contrivances that play out very quickly. The worst is when Cutter, a monster who, as has been established over the course of the book, loves to torture with knives and is amazingly strong and fast, dukes it out with Tate and actually runs away because she gives him a bad scratch! Okay, okay, he retires chagrined from the field of battle, prepared to fight another day, with a "let's go another round someday soon" parting threat, but c'mon. He just leaves? It feels like Yovanoff wrote herself into a corner, with all of the kids captured and being held in the graveyard by creatures much stronger than them and the Lady about to murder Tate's baby sister, and realized if it played out honestly, they were all going to die. And that would suck.

However, the part of the ending I did like is how Mackie finally defeats the Lady (with a major assist from the Morrigan, of course). The connection between love and the survival of the fey is one made several times in the book (Emma's love kept Mackie alive into his teen years, and like him, the rest of the fey are sustained by worship and adulation of the town) and has a big part to play in the ending, when Mackie realizes the love of his friends and family make him stronger than the Lady, who is diminished by her inability to truly understand what love is. She equates love with the kind of worship that comes from fear, and her inability to understand the more purer forms of love is what gives Mackie the edge. Though I complain that the ending is rushed, I did like how this theme ultimately plays out. It didn't feel like a cheat, nor did the fairly pathetic nature of the Lady's death, with the Morrigan tutting over her corpse.

Overall, I complain, but I enjoyed reading this eerie story. I loved the setting of Gentry and its secret underside, its intriguing history, and the complex and frighteningly inhuman nature of the fey (especially on the Morrigan's side). I thought Mackie was a sympathetic character, given all the secrets he has to unearth before he can feel safe, and I liked his relationship with his sister. I may not have bought his romantic feelings for Tate, but I did believe that he loved his sister Emma. The writing itself isn't super distinctive -- it's kind of "see-through" writing that doesn't have its own style and just tells the story in a direct way -- but it's strong enough, particularly in describing the creepier aspects, that I have high hopes for Yovanoff's next book, especially if she continues the semi-horror route. show less