They said you were a changeling, didn’t they?
Rating: 1/5
Trigger Warnings: violence, murder, descriptions of gore
Spoiler Alert! If you haven’t read the book, this review will contain spoilers so it’s up to you if you continue…
I had high hopes for Philippa Gregory’s YA writing since her historical novels are so good, but the only word I can use to describe Changeling is weak. I wanted to like it, I’ve waited almost a week to write this review in the hopes that I could find more I enjoyed about the book and process the ending a bit better. I’m still disappointed though.
I was distinctly unimpressed with the introduction; Luca gets invited to train in this secret organisation at the start of the book and then we hear nothing more of it until suddenly (literally a couple of months later, I think) he’s a qualified Inquirer and we’re off on your first journey with him. Why not just introduce him ready qualified? Why not show us the process and get the reader involved? And why mention all this about his intelligence and possibly being a changeling child if it’s not going to really come up again? Also that intelligence? Really not proven by the following events.
The mystery of the nunnery just kind of sucked. What was more frustrating than the transparency of the “mystery” though, was Luca’s sudden turn around at the last second. It was bound to happen since the intensity of everything increased so rapidly, but he went from having zero suspicions - or at least having zero expressed in the text - to figuring the whole thing out just in time. I appreciate that in a mystery the reader shouldn’t know exactly what was going on, but Isolde and Ishraq had worked out what was happening whilst Luca didn’t have a clue. If they had spoken, I might be able to understand how Luca worked things out so quickly, but they didn’t. Luca went from understanding nothing to understanding everything, and as a reader I felt no kinship or enjoyment in working it out with him. I worked it out by myself, whilst Luca - instead of understanding from his investigation - very suddenly knew what was happening. Changeling was the worst writing I’ve seen from Gregory, there was no subtlety to it, the whole thing just felt clunky, maybe even like a first draft.
Sometimes things were mentioned that went nowhere, other times conversations were so circular it was like Gregory feared we wouldn’t understand what happened unless things were repeated a hundred times. Take, for example, the below extracts about Isolde going to see her godfather (or his son - I can’t really remember) in order to get revenge on her brother:
“I will turn on [my brother]. I will meet him and I will know what was my father’s will...I might declare war on him”
“I have been puzzled as to what I should do...I will go to the son of my father’s friend, my godfather’s son….I will ask him to clear my name, and to ride with me against my brother”
“It is not his own land. It is mine. I will hold him to account. I will return and take back my lands...I will go to my godfather’s son and get help.”
“I will have my revenge on my brother, I will regain my inheritance”
Isolde repeats her desire for vengeance four times - at least - within three pages of text. I get that she’s passionate about it, but I’m not going to forget what he plan is just because somebody else started talking. It just really frustrated me to read the same conversation happening on repeat, it was unrealistic and clumsy.
Do I really need to talk about the werewolf incident? Surely not. Surely I don’t need to talk about how a whole village of people mistook a young boy who had grown up in the woods to be a werewolf. I was really intrigued by the introduction of a mythical creature because I wanted a fantasy element in the series, it was the perfect set up; Luca’s mission is to fight the devil so I thought it made perfect sense to have some magic included. I was genuinely intrigued by the idea of a werewolf, and with Frieze making friends with it - and when it spoke? Oh my gosh, that was the most involved and puzzled I became throughout the whole book! Instead, Frieze made friends with a young child who had grown up in the wild. I don’t care how many years he had lived there, how dirty, covered in hair or how feral this child was, I do not believe it possible for everyone to continue to believe it was a werewolf after they had captured it.
And now we come to the ending. The ending which didn’t really make me want to continue reading the series. If you have a mystery series, surely you end it on a cliffhanger? Instead, they sorted out the second mystery of the book and then started on their next adventure. I shan’t deny that some sort of set up for the next book has been included, but I don’t think it was a very good one. There was no urgency, nothing to induce me to read the next book as soon as possible, no feeling of needing desperately to know what happens to the characters. I was left totally underwhelmed by the writing of this book...the plot could have been something, but what a let down.
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