[Joy Williams] is a talented, skillful writer. She evokes the feel and smell of certain moments with an eerie precision…. Certain characters, too, in her fiction, are entirely original and absolutely credible…. The evidence suggests that Miss Williams could and probably will write an excellent novel, which "The Changeling," unfortunately, is not.

Its action, more or less (Miss Williams does not exactly spell out her narrative), is this: A young woman, Pearl, is picked up while shoplifting by a man named Walker and taken to his family's 20,000-acre offshore (what shore is not specified) island, which they have owned for 100 years. Five semi-related and some unrelated children populate the island. Pearl bears a child named Sam to Walker, and then, disturbed by odd goings-on between the adults and children on the island …, she runs away—to be re-kidnapped, as it were, by Walker. On the plane back to...