Paul Cody’s novel The Stolen Child is horrifying and beautiful, sorrowful, measured, and truthful. The pace of the story, its calmness and depth, amazes. It circles, without anger, around the abduction and subsequent abuse of a little boy, exposing the far-reaching effects through the eyes of various characters at points following the event. The distance of some of these characters from the child does not make them peripheral, nor detached: the policeman who tried to solve the case, and who now enumerates his own, now grown children every night before bed, invoking their names like a spell or prayer; the waitress who is still haunted a quarter century later after having waited on the boy and his abductor unknowingly at a truck stop on a rainy night. The recollections of the characters closer to the boy—his mother, his brother—and those of the boy himself, now institutionalized as a grown man, are incredibly affecting. Cody’s prose is ethereal, oddly quiet, and otherworldly. This portrait of a ruined life and the other lives that suffered is impossibly and unexpectedly lovely.
Bethany Clement
The San Francisco Review of Books
July/August 1995