You genuinely feel for him and he speaks for many teenagers, not just supernatural ones, as he deals with insecurity and self-loathing. Because he's a changeling, he feels isolated and under constant pressure and it's made him painfully shy and introspective.

Mackie's a tremendously attractive central character.

She knows it wasn't her sister in that coffin and she wants Mackie to help her find the truth. But Tate won't keep quiet, won't keep the pact. It's the great taboo, the unspoken pact: Gentry's prosperity is maintaned by it, but its children pay the price. But despite Mackie's obvious suffering, the issue is buried, always skirted around and never truly faced. And changelings don't live long in the human world. Mackie is a Replacement, a fey, a changeling. His friends know it - especially his best friend Roswell, the most loyal friend a person could ever have. It's getting more and more difficult to avoid the truth. His allergies to blood and steel are getting worse and worse and his health is beginning to fail. People are getting nervous and it just won't stop raining. Recently, however, things have felt less secure. People are good and kind and the trials and tribulations of other places have traditionally been absent from Gentry. (Sept.Mackie lives in Gentry, a prosperous but quiet town. Combined with wicked cover art, this book has the makings of a success. Debut novelist Yovanoff offers well-developed characters, a fascinating take on the Fairy Court, and an exciting story line. Eventually, the two teenagers join forces in an attempt to overturn the town's intolerable status quo. Mackie, however-sickened by iron, terrified that his neighbors will turn on him-has paid a terrible price, as has Tate Stewart, who is traumatized by the loss of her baby sister, the latest stolen child. What, after all, is one baby taken every seven years, in exchange for continued economic prosperity? 'Everyone else's unemployment skyrockets, and their tech plants go bankrupt and their dairy farms fail, but not ours,' says Mackie's sister, Emma, one of the few who will acknowledge the town's secrets. Everyone knows it, though no one will acknowledge it, for fear of upsetting a deal the town made long ago. Mackie is a changeling, a fairy child exchanged for a stolen human baby. Many high school students feel like outsiders, but in this dark fantasy Mackie Doyle has better reason than most to be alienated.

The Replacement by Brenna Yovanoff