A Wild Winter Swan
A Novel
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- 8,99 €
Description de l’éditeur
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Maguire (Wicked) continues his fabulist fairy tale remixes with this enchanting story, which draws inspiration from the Hans Christian Andersen tale "The Wild Swans." In the original, a sister saves her seven brothers from the curse of living as swans by sewing them magical shirts; one brother's shirt isn't quite finished, and he ends up with a swan wing instead of an arm. Maguire brings this tale to New York City in 1962, where 15-year-old Laura Ciardi is preparing for an important Christmas Eve dinner in the brownstone where she lives with her Italian immigrant grandparents. Between troubles at school, the looming dread of attending a new boarding school in Canada, the expectations of her grandparents, and worries about her absent mother, Laura doesn't really have time to deal with the boy who crash lands in her bedroom with one huge swan wing for a left arm. But this new challenge turns out to be exactly what Laura needs to find courage to begin moving forward in her own life. Maguire parallels the swan boy's story of brokenness to Laura's own struggles overcoming class and cultural differences. Fans of Maguire's retellings will love this simple, elegant story. Correction: The publisher listed on a previous version of this review was incorrect.
