A Wild Winter Swan

Gregory Maguire

2020 • 240 pages

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After brilliantly reimagining the worlds of Oz, Wonderland, Dickensian London, and the Nutcracker, the New York Times bestselling author of Wicked turns his unconventional genius to Hans Christian Andersen's "The Wild Swans," transforming this classic tale into an Italian-American girl's poignant coming-of-age story, set amid the magic of Christmas in 1960s New York. 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.

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Madison

I think reading this in January, though still winter, was the wrong move. I'll see if I fare better with it leading up to Christmas next year while I'm at home. Still, I don't really like the blasé and frequently ignorant feeling attitude toward Catholicism.

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Amalia Gkavea

‘'The loneliness she felt was so keen it was almost elegant. It cut her. Every snowflake on her bare arms had steel blades.There was no future and no past in such immediate pain.''

I haven't read Wicked, I couldn't care less about trash with singing witches (green-faced or otherwise...) but I have read Egg & Spoon (a brilliant folktale about the Baba Yaga and Imperial Russia) and I loved it. A Wild Winter Swan is a tale set in New York during the 60s, inspired by Hans Christian Andersen's The Wild Swans and for the most part, it is a novel that attracts the reader's attention but fails to do justice to Andersen's masterpiece.

‘'No one stood nearby to look down at the girl in the bed and witness whether or not she really existed.''

Laura lives in an upper-class New York neighbourhood under the protection of her grandparents. A troubled teenager who can't seem to fit even in the city of diversity and confusion, unable to cope with school, afraid and unwilling to warm up to people. Before an important Christmas dinner, a strange boy lands on her window. A boy with one hand and one broken wing.

The setting is beautiful. New York in all its Christmas glory, its wintry spirit depicted in poetic, achingly moving paragraphs. This is not enough, I'm afraid. Through Laura's eyes the world is bleak and the focus of the story shifts towards the struggles of the immigrants, Italians and Irish, and the tale itself becomes a mere vehicle. Despite the writer's efforts to add a certain folksy atmosphere, the absence of a compelling cast of characters, the dialogue that leaves a lot to be desired and the fact that the folk tales itself doesn't shine make this retelling a rather forgettable effort, in my opinion.

Some folk tales are better left untouched.