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The Moorchild by Eloise McGraw
Sep. 23rd, 2009 02:06 amSaaski is a changeling, a half-human fae once named Moql, banished from her home and forced into the form of a human infant. As a human, she slowly forgets her life as Moql, but is always treated as an oddity and outsider by the humans she lives among.
I’ve always been interested in the concept of changelings, who are rejected by both of their worlds, and here McGraw focuses on the folklore surrounding changelings, without any of the “dark and edgy” approach popular in recent fae trends. Blaming the Fae/Folk/Little People was once an easy way to explain people who were “different,” and today, those differences are called things like depression, OCD, ADD, ADHD, bipolar, manic depressive, autistic, etc., as well as physical deformities or disabilities. And while we know from the start that Saaski is not human, she is still very much someone who is prejudiced against for acting differently from how other children act.
With changelings, my sympathy has always lain with both the abducted human baby and the creature forced to take its place. As the methods for discovering changelings involved beating, throwing into a fire or into a pit, drowning etc. (and often to small children and babies!) it’s hard not to sympathize with it, IMO, and McGraw treats both Saaski and the abducted human baby as victims, without overtly vilifying either race to do so. Most of the plot deals with the typical changeling tale from the perspective of a changeling, before diverging to also address the fate of the human, an aspect often ignored in these tales.
This is my second book of McGraw’s, the first being the excellent Mara, Daughter of the Nile, which is historical fiction. Moorchild hovers on the line between historical fiction and fantasy, and is written for a younger audience, but is just as good. Unfortunately, most of McGraw’s books don’t seen to be in print, and also seem to be written a bit young for me (in truth, this one almost is, but is kept from getting to close to that line at least partly because of the subject matter), so I’m not sure I’ll read/find any more of her books.
I’ve always been interested in the concept of changelings, who are rejected by both of their worlds, and here McGraw focuses on the folklore surrounding changelings, without any of the “dark and edgy” approach popular in recent fae trends. Blaming the Fae/Folk/Little People was once an easy way to explain people who were “different,” and today, those differences are called things like depression, OCD, ADD, ADHD, bipolar, manic depressive, autistic, etc., as well as physical deformities or disabilities. And while we know from the start that Saaski is not human, she is still very much someone who is prejudiced against for acting differently from how other children act.
With changelings, my sympathy has always lain with both the abducted human baby and the creature forced to take its place. As the methods for discovering changelings involved beating, throwing into a fire or into a pit, drowning etc. (and often to small children and babies!) it’s hard not to sympathize with it, IMO, and McGraw treats both Saaski and the abducted human baby as victims, without overtly vilifying either race to do so. Most of the plot deals with the typical changeling tale from the perspective of a changeling, before diverging to also address the fate of the human, an aspect often ignored in these tales.
This is my second book of McGraw’s, the first being the excellent Mara, Daughter of the Nile, which is historical fiction. Moorchild hovers on the line between historical fiction and fantasy, and is written for a younger audience, but is just as good. Unfortunately, most of McGraw’s books don’t seen to be in print, and also seem to be written a bit young for me (in truth, this one almost is, but is kept from getting to close to that line at least partly because of the subject matter), so I’m not sure I’ll read/find any more of her books.
