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Raised
by her stern Italian grandparents, Laura Ciardi is a lonely fifteen-year-old
recently expelled after retaliating against a school bully. Her main company is
their cook, the delightful Mary Bernice, and two friendly workmen repairing the
family brownstone before a big holiday feast.
There, Laura’s grandparents hope
to entice their rich Irish brother-in-law into investing in her Nonno’s
grocery, while Laura wants a guardian angel to rescue her from potential
boarding school in Montreal. Appearing instead on the roof, one stormy night,
is a dirty, bedraggled young man with a swan’s wing for an arm.
Hilarity and
awkwardness ensue as Laura tries to care for him and build him another
wing without anyone noticing. Sensitive portraits of generational conflict and
coming-of-age intertwine with whimsy as Maguire touchingly shows how people
invoke stories to help elucidate their complicated world.
A Wild Winter Swan was published last week by William Morrow/HarperCollins. I reviewed it for the 9/1/20 issue of Booklist (reprinted with permission). A number of Maguire's novels incorporate historical settings: Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister (17th-c Holland), Hiddensee (early 19th-c Germany), Mirror Mirror (16th-c Italy). It was a nice change to see an American setting used for this latest imaginative tale.
This sounds good! It makes me remember Zilpha Keatley Snyder's "Black and Blue Magic", a children's book which also involves swan wings - such a great book and a good read-aloud.
ReplyDeleteI haven't read that book of hers, but loved her Green Sky trilogy as a child.
ReplyDeleteI read "The Egypt Game," "The Velvet Room" and "The Bronze Pen" also and enjoyed them - I imagine they've been weeded from our elementary library though.
ReplyDeleteWe have two of them in the teacher's center in my library, amazingly enough. We don't have Black and Blue Magic, though.
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