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The Child Thief by Brom | Book Review

Posted December 8, 2023 by Haze in Book Reviews / 1 Comment

The Child Thief by Brom

Peter is quick, daring, and full of mischief—and like all boys, he loves to play, though his games often end in blood. His eyes are sparkling gold, and when he graces you with his smile you are his friend for life, but his promised land is not Neverland. Fourteen-year-old Nick would have been murdered by the drug dealers preying on his family had Peter not saved him. Now the irresistibly charismatic wild boy wants Nick to follow him to a secret place of great adventure, where magic is alive and you never grow old. Even though he is wary of Peter’s crazy talk of faeries and monsters, Nick agrees. After all, New York City is no longer safe for him, and what more could he possibly lose?

There is always more to lose.

Accompanying Peter to a gray and ravished island that was once a lush, enchanted paradise, Nick finds himself unwittingly recruited for a war that has raged for centuries—one where he must learn to fight or die among the “Devils,” Peter’s savage tribe of lost and stolen children.

There, Peter’s dark past is revealed: left to wolves as an infant, despised and hunted, Peter moves restlessly between the worlds of faerie and man. The Child Thief is a leader of bloodthirsty children, a brave friend, and a creature driven to do whatever he must to stop the “Flesh-eaters” and save the last, wild magic in this dying land.

The Reason

Another one of his books – Slewfoot – came highly recommended, so I went to check him out and saw that most of his books had high ratings. I went on Libby to borrow a whole bunch of his books and this one just happened to be the first one available.

The Quotes

“Men who fear demons see demons everywhere.”

“Everything comes with a price. Everything. Some things just cost more than others.”

“Both sides so blinded by their fear and hate of each other that they couldn’t see they were all fighting for the same thing.”

The Characters

Well, this is a mash up retelling of a few different stories, but most notably, Peter Pan and the Mists of Avalon, so we see some familiar characters, but also a lot of new ones.

I want to state upfront that I’m having a lot of trouble with this review because I am a character-driven reader, and I hated the character inconsistencies in this book. I wanted so badly to DNF by the time I was 75% in, but I also wanted to give it a chance because of the great ratings.

My Thoughts

To give credit where it’s due, I think the story idea is really good and I love how creative Brom got with fitting in the Peter Pan story with the Mists of Avalon, and a bunch of other Scottish folklore. I also liked that he didn’t shy away from the darkness and gory, and I think that the story in general was very well-written.

In trying to stay objective, I think that if I wasn’t a character-driven reader, and if character motivations and inconsistencies wasn’t such a big deal to me, I might have really liked this book. But I don’t.

My Feels

This book made me angry, and not in a good way. It’s mostly my own fault because the longer I stay with a book I don’t like, the angrier I get, and maybe I should have DNF’d earlier but I ended up finishing it instead because of the sunk-cost fallacy and wanting to mark it as finished.

The Issues

I’m going to put them in spoiler tags because I’ve got rants and they give away a lot of the story. Click on the arrows to read more, but only if you’ve already read the book or don’t care that you get spoiled. You’ve been warned!

Nick

Nick ran away because he was in an unsafe environment that his mother put him in and he was originally very angry with his mother. During a conversation with the Devils, they said something about him being a bad person for leaving his mom in that unsafe situation (that she put him in), and he began to feel guilty and wanted to go home to her. First of all, it’s not Nick’s responsibility to take care of his mother, but the other way around, but that’s another story and not really part of the character inconsistencies. What I didn’t like was that in the beginning of the book, Nick knew that it was a situation his mother put him and rightly blamed her for it and it was a reason for him to run away. Then later in the book, he started thinking he was the bad person for leaving his mom behind, and it became a reason for him to want to go home. His change of heart didn’t feel organic or reasonable, it felt like a plot point.

Not to mention the whole time he kept complaining about being there in Devil Tree and wanting to go home, he never actually tried to go home and kept inserting himself into situations and helping people whom he said he didn’t care about. I just didn’t connect to his character motivations, like there was no reason for him to do whatever he did.

The Devils

Leroy killed one of the Devils (I forget her name and I can’t check it because I listened on audiobook) and framed Nick for it. The rest of the Devils were upset because they liked Nick and didn’t want it to be true, but if it was true, they had to go after Nick for justice. Later on, they did find out that it wasn’t true, and instead of being happy, they were disappointed that they couldn’t get to kill him?! That doesn’t make sense at all. Again, I don’t get the character motivations.

It also didn’t make sense to me that they used Nick’s guilt about leaving his mother to make him stay with them. They tell him he’s a bad person for leaving his mother, so he wants to go home. But then they use the fact that he left his mother to guilt him into staying with them. It just doesn’t make sense, it’s counterproductive!

Leroy

As a character, Leroy just doesn’t make sense. He was a bully, and a blustering one at that, but yet he was so meek when it came to challenges? He was picking fights with everyone and everything, you’d think his fake bravado would at least get him fighting in the real world. He might not be good enough to win fights, and I can totally see him taking the credit for Nick’s fight, yes, but not running from fights. Especially when we find out later that he ran away because he killed his father! And not to mention he’s the one I’d have expected to take the Captain’s offer of water in exchange for betraying the Devils. His character is just all over the place for me.

I should also say here that after Leroy framed Nick, Nick was obviously not a huge fan of Leroy and wished him dead in not very kind ways. And yet, not long after, when Leroy was actually dying and Peter wanted to leave him behind, Nick defended Leroy and condemned Peter for being heartless. I mean… there was no reason for Nick’s change of heart, it felt like he just wanted to be contrary.

Peter

Was he a good guy? Was he a bad guy? I don’t even know. He believed in Nick, until he didn’t, because it was a convenient plot point. He was strong and resilient and independent, until he became weak and in thrall to the Lady’s every wish, because it was a convenient plot point. Look, I like character arcs, but there are no character arcs here. I don’t even know if there are any real characters here, they’re all just puppets and caricatures.


There are actually lots of other issues but I don’t want to get into them because the more I do, the more upset I’ll get. I actually still intend to read Brom’s other book, Slewfoot, because it was the original recommendation and there are 12 years in between the two books and authors can improve. But I’m also going to be more discerning and allow myself to bail at the first sign of character inconsistencies!

My Rating

2/5 stars. I’m sorry, I just can’t get past all the issues.

Have you read this book? Would you read this book? Did you like the book or do you think you would like it?

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