#BlogTour ‘A Wild Winter Swan’ by Gregory Maguire

About the book…

Following her brother’s death and her mother’s emotional breakdown, Laura now lives on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, in a lonely townhouse she shares with her old-world, strict, often querulous grandparents. But the arrangement may be temporary. The quiet, awkward teenager has been getting into trouble at home and has been expelled from her high school for throwing a record album at a popular girl who bullied her. When Christmas is over and the new year begins, Laura may find herself at boarding school in Montreal.

Nearly unmoored from reality through her panic and submerged grief, Laura is startled when a handsome swan boy with only one wing lands on her roof. Hiding him from her ever-bickering grandparents, Laura tries to build the swan boy a wing so he can fly home. But the task is too difficult to accomplish herself. Little does Laura know that her struggle to find help for her new friend parallels that of her grandparents, who are desperate for a distant relative’s financial aid to save the family store.

As he explores themes of class, isolation, family, and the dangerous yearning to be saved by a power greater than ourselves, Gregory Maguire conjures a haunting, beautiful tale of magical realism that illuminates one young woman’s heartbreak and hope as she begins the inevitable journey to adulthood.

Huge thanks to Anne Cater of Random Things Tours for my blogtour invite and gifted e-arc of A Wild Winter Swan which is published on October 6th in e-book, and October 14th in paperback from William Morrow, or Harper 360 in the UK.

This is such a lovely book, I remember reading the original Hans Christian Anderson tale as a child, haunted by the image of the heroine having to sew shirts made from stingy nettles without crying out loud, in order to turn her brothers from swans, back into boys. She runs out of nettles so-spoiler alert!-one of her brothers has only one sleeve land that leaves him with a swan’s wing instead of an arm.

I wondered how Gregory Maguire would interpret this tale, how he would transpose it to New York in the 60’s (I am guessing because of the mention of the Cuban Missile Crisis and JFK) and, I think, in this tale, it is just best to let it wash over you rather than look for correlations as, if you have read any of his other books, you’ll be aware he has a distinct style when re-imagining myths, tales, and cultural cornerstones.

Laura is such an engaging narrator, she straddles childhood and adulthood in the same way that she straddles being from Italian heritage, and American born, and in the same way that she is both loved by her family as well as abandoned by them through war, and death. Her crime is standing out, and being different from her contemporaries because she lives with her grandparents, because she is of Italian descent at a time when they were treated, post World War 2 , with immense suspicion.

The fact that her father, Giuseppe, adopted the name Joe, and died in the war fighting for the Americans holds no weight with Laura’s classmates who use her ‘otherness’ to taunt her. When she strikes back, it is she who is punished and honestly, I was enraged by this. Her grandparents want to send her to live with nuns, in Montreal, and all she wants is an answer to whether her mother will ever come home. And no one can tell her that. She is the sole survivor of her mother, father and brother, and is lost and lonely in a city where the melting pot of cultures and societies, jar with the archetypal expectation of American youth to be (ironically) blond haired, blue eyed, clear skinned and heterosexual.

So it is no wonder that she wants to be like the owl, found in a hidey hole , exposed when contractors were working on her grandparents shop. She prefers the anatomy of birds, the functionality of their structure and ability to make a home wherever there is a gap that they can secure.

Laura wants a freedom that has no limits, and adulthood still seems so far away-and when the swan winged boy falls into her life, not only does it tie the original story in, but it spurs Laura to create the opportunity for her to reshape her life, and see herself differently. As Christmas approaches, and a time, if ever there was, for miracles to happen, Laura finds the boy she is trying to help and the real world outside her bedroom door, are heading on a collision course.

A voyage of discovery which is lyrical, heartfelt, and appreciates the clash between the need for individuality, whilst hoping for acceptance, this is a brilliant and timely short novel ,about finding your feet in a world which is continuously moving right under them.

About the author…

Gregory Maguire is an American author, whose novels are revisionist retellings of children’s stories (such as L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz into Wicked).

He received his Ph.D. in English and American Literature from Tufts University, and his B.A. from the State University of New York at Albany.

He was a professor and co-director at the Simmons College Center for the Study of Children’s Literature from 1979-1985. In 1987 he co-founded Children’s Literature New England (a non-profit educational charity).

Links-http://www.gregorymaguire.com/