The Child Thief | Review

4.98/5.00

Published: 2009

Genre: Horror, Retelling

Goodreads

Hauntingly beautiful in language, in plot, in illustrations, in world-building, in everything about this book.

Do you want to play a game? Do you remember Neverland? Flying kids, never aging, cotton candy clouds, mischief, fighting pirates. It sounded fun. An escape from the adult world, permanently. How easily we were tricked. How easily we overlooked the disturbing idea of someone stealing kids away to a mystical land of monsters where they never aged.

Artwork by Gerald Brom

It’s long but worth the commitment. It is a sad, fairly graphic tale of lost children trained to be savage to survive in a land of barghest, flesh-eaters, elves, pixies, and cruel gods. Readers will find little semblance to the Disney Peter Pan, except for the red hair that is.

Nick is a pretty standard protagonist, at least for the first half of the story. The one thing that sets him apart is the darkness inside him. Tragedy doesn’t feel like a manufactured sob story concocted by the author just to make us feel sorry for some martyred, never-asked-for-this hero.

Peter, the lonely boy with golden eyes and seductive promises, is the best part of the story. Personally, I felt disappointed about the lack of a Tinker Bell-esque character. Sure, you have the pixies, and there is the suggestion of a pixie who appears more than the others. However, the jealous Tinker Bitch that I loved from Disney was pretty nonexistent, playing as brief and minor a role as Smee.

I also have to give props to how Brom wrote Leroy, Ulfger, and the Reverend. Under the hand of a different author, they probably would have been cartoonish. Several authors tend to overdo it, as if afraid their readers might not get, hey, this isn’t the good guy, piling on whatever bad trait they can think of and giving their antagonists weak or fundamentally nonexistent motivations.

I definitely recommend this book to anyone and everyone. So far, it’s one of my favorite reads this year. As you can see, I came close to a full five, but I didn’t enjoy this quite as much as other five-star books, like In the Woods.

Gerald Brom has also done work in video games and comics, creating beautiful illustration.