Leda and the Swan
A Novel
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
“Affecting narrative about consent, power and loneliness.”—Time
“Intoxicatingly ominous.”—Kirkus Reviews
In a hothouse of collegiate sex and ambition, one young woman mysteriously disappears after a wild campus party, and another becomes obsessed with finding her.
It’s Halloween night on a pastoral East Coast college campus. Scantily costumed students ride the fine line between adolescence and adulthood as they prepare for a night of drinking and debauchery. Expectations are high as Leda flirts with her thrilling new crush, Ian, and he flirts back. But by the end of the night, things will have taken a turn.
A mysterious young woman in a swan costume speaks with Leda outside a party—and then vanishes. When Leda later wakes up in Ian’s room the next morning, she is unsure exactly what happened between them. Meanwhile, as the campus rouses itself to respond to the young woman’s disappearance, rumors swirl, suspicious facts pile up, and Leda’s obsession with her missing classmate grows. Is it just a coincidence that Ian used to date Charlotte, the missing woman? Is Leda herself in danger? As Leda becomes more and more dangerously consumed with the mystery of Charlotte and questions about Ian, her motivations begin to blur. Is Leda looking for Charlotte, or trying to find herself?
In Leda and the Swan, Anna Caritj’s riveting storytelling brings together a suspenseful plot; an intimate, confessional voice; and invaluable insights into sex, power, and contemporary culture.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Caritj pulls off a smart twist on the campus novel in her thrilling debut. Leda believes herself to be the last person to have seen her classmate Charlotte Mask before Charlotte left a Halloween party and disappeared. As Leda tasks herself with piecing together the clues to Charlotte's disappearance, she also contends with unease over a blacked-out night spent with her crush, Ian Gray, when Charlotte disappeared. Unsure how she woke up with a bloody lip, she wonders if he assaulted her. Though the opening scenes of Greek life and partying feel repetitive and stagnant, the remainder unfolds as an engrossing tale about the nature of consent, sexual violence, and performative activism, such as the bake sales and "group screams" put on by Leda's sorority. As Leda's obsession with finding Charlotte leads her to chilling discoveries, she starts to wonder if Ian might be involved in the disappearance. The book's strength is in Caritj's prose, as she builds a brilliant contrast between the quotidian nature of college life and postadolescent feeling of otherworldliness. There is the "mercurial glinting, like stars, from shiny cans of Natty Light," and, on frat boys' Halloween costumes: "Only one wore a toga, but all four held themselves like small-town gods." This thoughtful exploration of contemporary sexual politics hits the spot.
