The Changeling

read this just out of my teens, and loved it to pieces. My paperback is falling apart, alas, so I have not reread it for some twenty years. So I don't know how it holds up to my adult view, but the friendship, the approach to being different and creativity were impressive to me when young.

If Martha Abbott was alive today, she'd be in her mid-50s, give or take a few years. I wonder what happened to her after that fateful sophomore year? I'm sure, in fact I hope, that she didn't marry Rufus. That she moved to New York City, and became a Broadway actress. Hung out with Andy Warhol, went to Studio 54. In the late 80s, she gave it all up and moved to Vermont, where she opened a small theater that did summer stock. Or maybe an acting school. In her 50s, she's made a comeback on Broadway. Or she's doing voice over work for an animated superhero series. Or she starred in Company as Joanne. Or more likely, she moved to San Francisco, where she had lots of gay friends who died of AIDs in the 80s, became politically active, started an underground theater group, married the guy of her dreams, had some fabulous children, outshone Cath and Tom (who are in their sixties now; her parents are at least in their 80s, probably in their 90s). Ivy became a modern ballet dancer, moved to New York. Or Paris. Had a string of lovers. Flirted with bisexuality. Knew and was known by everyone. Currently writing her memoir, where she will reveal everything. Kelly Peters is fat and lives in Modesto.

The Changeling is a really terrific book, and hasn't really grown stale with age. It's still just as poignant as when I first read it, so many years ago.

Writing a review for this treasured volume from my childhood seems impossible. Since first making the attempt, I have spent hours staring at the blank screen in front of me, have begun in a hundred different ways - "Some books aren't books at all, but mirrors..." / "Zilpha Keatley Snyder may not know it, but she wrote this book about me..." - but have always ended with the same admission of failure, with the same deletion of whatever facile comments I had typed, whatever little bits of text I had produced - text that had inevitably failed to capture the terrible beauty and power of The Changeling, its strange and elusive appeal, its unshakable hold on me. I am haunted by this book, and although I pride myself on being able to articulate even the most difficult of thoughts and emotions, I find it impossible to say why. Just as it once saved me, this seemingly simple children's novel now defeats me. Again and again. I am too close to it, perhaps...

I grew up in a beautiful old house on a hill, with a rundown old carriage house behind it, where my sisters and I were wont to play in younger days. A dreamer, always, I lived in my own world, dividing my time between the pages of whatever book I was devouring, and my imaginary (year-round) outdoor games. Naturally, I had a country of my own - ironically, given my childhood ignorance of the word "arcane," it was named Arcania - with its own intricate history, customs and culture. I spent hours creating the Arcanian language, and crafting its script (sadly, all lost to me today), with its superfluity of vowel forms. Arcania was my retreat and my stronghold, in a world that was beginning - just as I was starting to search for meaning in it - to make no sense, and was as real to me as anything I experienced in my more mundane, "workday" life.

No author has ever captured - for me - that reality of the imaginary, that power of childhood make-believe, with the same skill as Zilpha Keatly Snyder, in The Changeling. The story of two very different young girls - shy crybaby Martha, so worried about fitting in with her successful family, and wildly idiosyncratic Ivy Carson, daughter of the town's local criminal element - whose friendship is the salvation of both, it perfectly embodies one of the key realities of my own childhood: the role of imagination, and of the internal world, in creating a safe place in a decidedly unsafe existence. Like Ivy and Martha, whose created world was known as Green Sky - a world that Snyder would later use, in creating her brilliant dystopian Green Sky trilogy (n  Below the Rootn, n  And All Betweenn, n  Until the Celebrationn) - I too enacted a complicated series of rituals and plays surrounding my imagined world. Like them, this had extraordinary meaning for me, and is, to this day, terribly precious to me.

One of my favorite works of literature, of ANY kind, The Changeling is a book that has become entwined with my memories of my childhood, to the point that I cannot separate it out. I have lived in this book, as surely as Ivy and Martha did, and while I wouldn't venture to guarantee that it will speak to every young reader as it did (and does) to me, can readily attest to the fact that every word in it is true.

Might be ZKS' best. It's certainly one of my favorites and certainly one of her most sophisticated. The girl friendship/coming of age theme is nothing new, but if ZKS had written for an adult audience, she could have been the Elena Ferrante of her time.

ZKS creates that perfect blend of mostly realism, with just a whisper of magic. I would still love to join Martha and Ivy and the Tree People at Bent Oaks Grove.

I had forgotten (or maybe my childhood self didn't quite get) just how funny young Martha and Ivy are. The porkchop/paint scene and the attempted rescue of Dolly are hysterical.

Although my heart aches for Ivy, I am so impressed with how ZKS captures Martha's social anxiety and introverted nature: "...but a lot of things that seemed as simple as breathing to other people, still seemed as far away as the stars for Martha."

In an interesting way, the climactic reveal with Tom is both dated and not dated.

Two very different girls share a secret place in the trees.


(photo by Lisa Kimmell)

The spell for never growing up:
Know all the Questions, but not the Answers--Look for the Different instead of the Same--Never Walk where there's Room for Running--Don't do anything that can't be a Game.

"--maybe you can grow up if you want to. I can't."--Ivy Carson, The Changeling

Oh, this was good, except I wish I had read it as a 12 year old! Two girls from very different families become fast friends. The story follows them from age 7 to age 16. The younger years got kind of boring to me with all the magical thinking, but the teen years got very interesting. The end was very sweet and actually made me a bit misty eyed.

Snyder understands imaginative play and is able to convey the enchanted mood of creative children having their own special world. She has been recognized for doing this in her Newbery Honor book The Egypt Game, but I think it is handled even better in this book. This is a world that does not follow the conventional rules of established games and is kept separate from most grown-ups and children.

The fantasy world that Ivy Carson (the self-proclaimed changeling) and her close friend Martha Abbott develop over years, however, is not the only side to this story. A great deal is about real-world activities that hinge upon Ivy's family and how they are received in the town and on how a family name can tar with a broad brush, sometimes unjustly. Both Ivy and Martha are misfits, out of place in their own families, but often swept along by the perceptions and prejudices of others (both within and outside of these families).

I suspect that most readers identify with Martha than with Ivy. Hers is the perspective we get on the various happenings of the story (sometimes we get more with the convention of "Martha heard about it later in bits and pieces"), and I think this creates an intimacy where we, as readers, understand and sympathize with Martha while everyone else doesn't. Ivy, on the other hand, is a mystery - we know what she tells Martha, but is it true?

The story has a timeless feel to some degree, although some specifics of the real-world happenings ground it in a late 1960s to early 1970s timeframe. I think it's set in southern California, like many of Snyder's books (and I think there is a connection to her earlier book The Velvet Room - both make reference to a Montoya family, with an old house surrounded by a fruit orchard). I could see it being rewritten to set it in a different time, but I don't think there is any need to update it to make it relevant for youngsters to whom 1970 is the time of their grandparents. What really matters about this book goes beyond its setting.

By and large, the supporting characters are not wooden stereotypes that you know from other books; they behave realistically with their own idiosyncrasies. Only Kelly fits the "popular mean girl" mold, but even she is someone you have probably met in your own life, not an exaggeration or a caricature. I especially appreciated the inclusion of Mrs. Smith, an older woman who is nevertheless something of a kindred spirit to the young girls.

The book covers a number of years (from Martha in second to tenth grade), and what is particularly unusual about it is how Ivy unexpectedly disappears for long stretches of time, eventually returning just as unexpectedly. In the meantime we continue following Martha, seeing how she reacts to the absence and how she develops on her own. Then we see the two friends reunite, sometimes as if no time had passed, sometimes unsurely. Their fantasy talk and play develops, and I especially liked how it developed in middle school when they reviewed their older activities and "curated" them into presentations for younger children.

After a bit of a surprise climax, we learn of how Martha matures. We are given a little glimpse of new things in her life that could be big changes. In some ways this feels like a very satisfying wrap up. But then there is yet another final chapter that adds more information and suggests other possibilities. This is another example of how Snyder refuses to give us a conventional cookie-cutter story.

In addition to the connections to The Velvet Room and The Egypt Game, there's also a link to Snyder's Green Sky trilogy (beginning with Below the Root), which is an entirely fantastical tale, developing out of the stories and situations that Ivy and Martha create. I don't think there are prerequisites for reading and enjoying any of these books, but those who have experience with more of Snyder's catalog may be rewarded with additional insights. I have found Madeleine L'Engle to be another author where this is true.

Illustrations by Snyder's frequent collaborator Alton Raible are distinctive and add to the mood.

A quite lovely short novel from the 70s by a children’s writer I hadn’t heard of before. From the title I thought it would be fantasy, but it’s about the friendship between protagonist Martha, who comes from a middle-class family but feels like an outsider, and Ivy, who belongs to the town’s most notoriously wrong-side-of-the-tracks family. When the girls meet at age 7, they begin an intense friendship involving elaborate games of make-believe. Ivy declares she’s actually a changeling, and Martha is eager to believe it. Over the years, their friendship is challenged as Martha adjusts to the world around her and Ivy remains an outsider. 3.5