I bought The Stolen Child in the Oakland airport last week, and read most of it on a cross-country flight, finishing it over the next couple of days. It's an easy and engaging read; a perfect airplane book, really. The language is spare but powerful and the images vivid and memorable.

The Stolen Child is about a group of changelings that live in the woods, occasionally kidnapping a human child so that one of their own can assume the child's identity. Such things have existed since time immemorial, we learn; but as the book progresses through the 20th century, the world changes out from under them. In a parallel plot, we follow the life of a changeling in the human world, living the life of the child he replaced -- a child who is now one of the changelings in the forest.

It's the kind of book I really would have loved as a younger man. It grapples with issues of identity and memory, belonging and isolation. It also appeals to the impostor complex, the inferiority complex, the outsider that lurks in all of our psyches during adolescence and beyond.

It bothers me a little that I feel I'm past all that. Am I a grown-up now? When did that happen, exactly?