Welcome to Gaia! :: View User's Journal | Gaia Journals

Time runs on. The items and marketplace on Gaia seem a tad outgrown for someone my age now, let alone the entire site, but I digress. Figure I can offer stuff I used to collect as a prize.

Can someone help me remember the title of a book? I'm sitting on

ten June 2007 letters,
one April 2007 letter,
ten March 2007 letters,
ten February 2007 letters,
two January 2007 letters,
three December 2006 letters,
three November 2006 letters,

(You know what? I'm sick of scrolling and counting.)
...aaand five tickets to Round One of Famestar,

Items not worth a lot? Sell 'em for some small gold then. Not enough, the economy's ********? Well, so's the real one. Either way the above is yours if you can answer my query.

There was a story in the children to young adult range I'd read when I was younger and I can't remember the title or author.

The protagonist was a young boy who was the only one that knew his baby brother had been replaced by some sort of changeling or goblin. He had several problems in the process of trying to find the real one:

-He would have visions of his neighbor, who had gone missing, telling him that his brother was safe with her, though they were both trapped in a fairy world where eating their food would mean never being able to leave. His baby brother was all right because the neighbor breastfed him.

-His mother, stressed out from taking care of the fake baby, is increasingly resentful and neglecting of the protagonist, because there is a doppelganger masquerading as him while engaging in bad behavior. I remember one passage where the protagonist asks his mother for bacon, only for her to respond in a tirade that he can have everything in the house except for said bacon, because eariler his doppelganger had eaten an inhuman amount of oatmeal in one sitting.

-There is a Queen in the other world who tries to tempt the protagonist with a feast. Eventually he passes when she shoves a beef-and-bean burrito against his face and he still won't eat.

-A hollow man stalks the protagonist throughout the 'real' world, though only the protagonist seems to be able to see the fact that he is hollow. Eventually the hollow man is killed, though I don't remember how.

I posted this on Yahoo! Answers and all I got were a spammer who said 'tits!' and someone else asking me to help them find a title of their own. Help me out here.