Stolen: Guest: A Changeling Tale by Mary Downing Hahn

Wiping the sweat from my eyes, I yanked a thistle out by its roots. I scowled at my baby brother Thomas, nearby on the grass.

"You!" I mumbled. "If it weren't for you, I'd be down the lane, skipping rope with the village girls. It's a wicked thing to say, but sometimes I wish you'd never been born!"

Thomas smiled at me as if I'd praised him. Truth to tell, he was a sweet baby. And beautiful, although no one ever said so. All of us knew it was bad luck to compliment a baby. It was the Kinde Folke we feared. If the Kinde Folke learned of a beautiful baby boy's birth, they'd steal him away and leave one of their own sickly creatures in his place.

But thoughtlessly, Mollie Cloverall tries on the pretty necklace that Granny Hedgepath had put around Thomas' neck at birth to protect him from being taken by the faery folke, and when she looks away for a moment, he is gone, leaving a greedy, wizened creature of a baby who flails and screams for Mollie's mother's milk all day and night. The elders say that Thomas will be treated as Mollie's family treats the changeling. But as she sees her thin, worn mother struggle, the penitent, Mollie vows to travel with the creature that her mother calls Guest through Mirkwood Forest and the Dark Lands beyond and somehow barter a trade, the strange changeling for her beautiful baby brother.

So, no matter how scared I was, I had to make things right. Me, Mollie Cloverall all by myself.

And in the best tradition of all such quests, Mollie dares to do the right thing, in Mary Downing Hahn's Guest: A Changeling Tale (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Clarion, 2019), a Dark Ages tale of a remembered world of magical creatures that seems to remain in the subconscious mind of all humankind. Since her initial award-winning tale of a restless ghost, Wait Till Helen Comes: A Ghost Story,

Hahn's insightful novels have helped readers master their innermost fears, and in her newest suspense story she turns to the ancient folklore of the Faery Folke of the British Isles, plumbed so well by authors J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, C. S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia, and Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising series. In that august company, Mary Downing Hahn remains the masterful mistress of ghostly mysteries for middle readers in which the quest for the good is always the guide and justice is finally done.