What a gorgeous and wonderful story! The author beautifully captures the friendship between two young girls, both social misfits but for different reasons, who share a rich imagination and sense of the inherent drama and magic of life. Loved it.

It was alright. The blurb I read on a different copy of this book made this seem like it was a fantasy and not just a couple of kids playing make-believe. I maybe would have liked this when I was much younger.
I felt like this was going to be a cute little fluffy fantasy read. When I started reading, I kept pushing through because I thought it would maybe get better, but this just didn't do it for me.
The main characters family is just mean to her best friend. They don't care to understand their daughter and keep trying to push her to be something she's not. The main character stays envying other people. With the way her best friend is, you would think that she'd have more character development, but she really doesn't.
I didn't even finish this. I gave up about halfway through.

The Changeling was originally published in 1970 and republished in Dec. of 2012. When my children were young, we read Snyder's The Egypt Game, which remains one of my favorite juvenile books.

The Changeling won a Newbery Honor Book Award, the Christopher Medal, and was named an outstanding book for young people by the Junior Library Guild.

This is a YA novel about growing up, friendship, imagination, and trust. When seven-year-old Martha Abbot, a little overweight and shy, meets Ivy Carson, a friendship blossoms that saves both girls from their very different outcast states.

Ivy's family has a terrible reputation (drinking, vandalism, debt), and regardless of how different Ivy is--she is labeled a Carson. Martha, who doesn't fit in with her accomplished family (or anywhere else) finds the perfect companion in Ivy to help her brave the world.

In self-defense, Ivy has decided that she is a changeling, and Martha has no real difficulty excepting this fact. For the next eight years, the Carson's move in and out of Martha's life, as they pack up and leave for a year or two (escaping whatever trouble they've gotten themselves into) and then return.

Although a hint of the darkness of Ivy's home life hangs in the air, the girls' friendship keeps both girls a bit removed from the fray of everyday life...until an act of vandalism leaves Ivy and Martha accused of the crime.

I loved this book. Highly recommended.

Net Galley/Open Road Young Readers.

YA. 1970 and 2012. Print version 226 pages. ISBN-10: 0595321801

This was one of my absolute favorite books when I was a kid!

I should read it again.

I read this book for the first time as an adult, despite knowing about it since I was a kid, and my first thought was "Why didn't I ever read this when I was in middle school?" I went through something similar as Martha, and my bully was also named Kelly. I also liked making up stories and lived in a bit of a fantasy world as a kid. I felt like this book really told a great story of what it's like to be a kid.

The main story revolves around a friendship between two girls, Martha and Ivy. Martha comes from a upper middle class family, and Ivy comes from a sketchier background. Ivy has many siblings and her family is always taking up and leaving at random, usually because someone in the family has gotten into some trouble. Martha's family doesn't approve of Ivy and discourages her from spending time with Ivy.

Martha ends up hanging out with Ivy in most of her spare time anyway, and they invent elaborate fantasy stories. Ivy claims to be a "changeling," which is a baby born to a magical being and is switched at birth with a human baby. Considering how unusual Ivy is compared to most everyone else Martha knows, she figures Ivy just might be telling the truth.

Martha has a neighbor, Kelly, who is the most popular girl in their class and likes to give Martha a hard time. With Ivy's help, Martha is able to gain more confidence throughout the story.

I would recommend this book to anyone. It may have been written for children and teenagers, but I think most people could find something to relate to in the characters. A very well-written book and completely deserving of the awards it won.

This book switches each chapter between the changeling's story and the human's story. I found it to be a little confusing as a reader because you would be so focused on one story and then the book would jump to a different one in the following chapter. It kind of took away from the book in my opinion because you would either forget what was going on in the previous story or you wanted to continue with one story to find out what happened next and be disappointed because you are ambushed with a whole different storyline.

The story had great potential and could go many unexpected ways, but after the first revelation, it simply fails to deliver anything but a story written so many times with a few different motives. What sets it apart from those other stories is the fact that the main premise is just a part of the larger picture in those other stories.

The characters rush through growing up just for the sake of the author's need to prove some point that white people are going to be white, parents are always going to be parents and kids will always be kids (read: mean when they need to for the sake of the story and adult when the real adults fail to).

This book was very near and dear to me as a child. I think I last read it when I was probably...ten? It's been so long ago, I can hardly remember how old I was. It's possible I only read it once. But it left such an impression on me as a little girl that even into adulthood I thought about it a lot. I decided to reread it to see if it was really as good as I thought when I was a kid. (Sometimes I'm hesitant to revisit books I loved as a child, because I worry about spoiling my memory of them.)

The Changeling was just as good as I remember it, though of course it could never evoke quite the same feelings in me as an adult as it did when I was a little girl. The important thing though was that I could see why it appealed to me so much as a child. I was definitely a colloquial Weird Little Girl, and so were my sisters and my friends, and I see so much of my own girlhood experiences reflected in this book. Actually I think some of the weird magic and made up rituals and pretend games that I was so into might have been directly inspired by Ivy and Martha's antics. But as I reread this I remembered more and more about my girlhood and some of the things that I felt while reading the book originally. For example, it took until almost the end of the book for me to remember that I use to think Ivy Carson was one of the most beautiful girls I had ever read about. I wanted to look and act just like her, she stood out to me as this ethereal being of magic and imagination, almost beyond reality, and I wished I could be as beautiful and mysterious as her.

The irony is that, reading it as an adult, I grasp a lot more of the nuance now and some of the darker things that were going on in the novel. Though as a child I had the impression that this book about two beautiful little girls and their imaginations had some element of shadow and grief to it (my favorite kind of story, as a child), I didn't really retain the meaning of much of it. But as an adult I understand the implications behind Ivy's absent family, their decrepit house, their secretive comings and goings, the moodiness and anger that Ivy sometimes displayed. I would say that this book is meant more for the 12-14 range of readers, not because someone younger wouldn't be able to enjoy it, but because some of the things that motivate the characters are more implicitly understood by preteens/young teenagers who are not so far from the sparkling days of young childhood that they can't relate to Martha and Ivy, but also who are old enough to pick up on the inner sorrows and uncertainties clouding these two girls as they grow up.

I would call "The Changeling" a timeless novel because even though it was written almost 50 years ago now, there's very little in the narrative to actually age it. (I'd say the thing that ages it the most is actually the fact that two little girls have the freedom to run around all over the woods and town unsupervised by their parents before they're even 8 years old -- I can't imagine kids today being allowed to do that so young) In general, if you didn't know when the book was published, you might think that it was set in present day. I appreciate that Snyder did that, whether intentionally or not, because to me that makes it much more relatable to any little girl; Martha and Ivy's experiences and feelings are pretty much universal to anyone who from girlhood has felt like they weren't quite like everyone else, and longed for a friend who let them be their truest self.

Zilpha Keatley Snyder

Childhood is magic. I read Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s The Headless Cupid and The Egypt Game when I was a kid and enjoyed them very much, but somehow The Changeling slipped past my radar until recently. I realized, as I was reading The Changeling for the first time, that all three of these books are a paean to the magic of childhood. The setting of each book is firmly grounded in reality—there are no apparent gates to other worlds or fairies tiptoeing about, just ordinary, everyday neighborhoods in which the characters live. However, the main characters of Snyder’s books are anything but ordinary. Sure, on the outside they may appear to be nothing more than awkward, shoe-gazing kids who aren’t the most popular at their school. But Snyder’s protagonists use their imaginations to soar high above the everyday, and this is what makes her stories so magical. Of the three books mentioned above, I think The Changeling illustrates the magic of childhood most beautifully. Reading this book has brought back many fond memories of all the make-believe games and worlds I used to invent with my friends.

In The Changeling, seven-year-old Martha Abbott feels out of place as the youngest of a family of high-achieving go-getters. She doesn’t seem to have the same ambition and boldness as her siblings, parents, or grandmother, all of whom refer to her as the Mouse because of her shy, retreating nature.

One day at school, Martha meets a new classmate named Ivy Carson who says she is not really a member of the Carson family, which is notorious for getting into all kinds of trouble, but rather a changeling—a fairy child switched at birth with a human child. Intrigued by Ivy’s firm belief in something so fantastical, Martha starts spending all her free time with this highly imaginative girl. Suddenly, through Ivy’s eyes, their mundane surroundings reveal magic talismans, secret entrances to other worlds, and possibilities Martha never dreamed of pursuing. Although the kids at school taunt Ivy for being a Carson, which according to gossip is the same as being a reprobate, Martha sticks resolutely by her friend’s side, even when Ivy’s family moves away every other year to lay low and then comes back again.

What keeps Martha loyal to Ivy over the years is not only Ivy’s beautiful imagination but also her belief in Martha’s potential. Ivy encourages Martha to come up with her own ideas, to try things she’s never tried before. In one scene, Martha confesses her fear that she might be sent away to live with her grandmother in Florida. Ivy declares they must do a spell, and instructs Martha to start setting up an altar in the woods outside their neighborhood, where they spend much of their time playing. “I don’t know how,” Martha protests. “You don’t need to know how,” Ivy says. “Just start doing it. You find out as you go along.”

Not much is spelled out about the Carson family’s troubles, but Ivy says her mother drinks too much and her father gets into shady business deals, so the reader gets just enough information to understand that Ivy’s background is anything but enchanted. I felt a mixture of wonder and heartbreak at Ivy’s determination to never grow up, like a female Peter Pan. “What’s wrong with grown-ups,” she says, “is that they think they know all the answers.” Together, she and Martha invent a spell that will keep them from growing up forever: “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.”

Will Martha and Ivy grow up, or will their spell work? Read the rest of the story and find out as you go along. I’ll just say this: there’s no greater magic than friendship.

The Changeling was first published in 1970, but I didn't realize this until after I had finished reading, which I did in one sitting. Obviously, the book has held up over time! What a charming story of friendship, small towns, imagination and self-discovery. It reminded of Snyder's own Egypt Game and of Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley and Me, Elizabeth by Konigsburg. A wonderful story of two outsider girls who find friendship and explore a magical world of imagination. Great stuff.

I've been on a bit of a kick lately with revisiting novels that were pivotal for me at different points in my life. I remember loving this as a kid, and I still really enjoyed a re read. ZKS's writing has aged incredibly well given that this was written in 1970!