A Wild Winter Swan by Gregory Maguire (2020)

"She passed pigeons scavenging for grain spilled from the feed buckets of the carriage horses. Crossed some widths where the wind growled with turbid force. Paced the stately alley of leafless elms, ended up at the snowy steps descending to the drained water basin of Bethesda Fountain. She approached the angel statue with its flared wings and its loving but blank expression. She tried to find the exact place to stand in which she could meet the angel's eyes and be recognized. But either the angel was blind, like justice, or Laura was just not worth noticing. Into the corridors of wind and time the angel looked, seeing what Laura could not see, seeing anything and maybe everything but Laura herself. Seeing the blank space that made up Laura." (p. 31)

A Wild Winter Swan is a novel full of intriguingly curious mise-en-scenes, perfect captures of the enchantment found during the winter holidays, particularly in the city: ascertainably, a bittersweet sadness. Found within the whirling center of these scenes is Laura Ciardi.

Laura Ciardi's story, for the most part, doesn't seem so different than many others: she is a first generation Italian-American living with her grandparents in a small building in a major city. In this case, Manhattan, New York. It is the 1960s, it is winter, and the small garret that makes her bedroom is a kind of haven (a place reminiscent of the nursery in Peter Pan, albeit for one) from the isolation she feels from not quite fitting in with the rest of the world at home and at school. Laura, for reasons that can only be speculated, is unexpectedly visited by a magical creature that author Gregory Maguire borrows from the old Danish fairy-tale The Wild Swans by Hans Christian Andersen; a long lost hopeful brother, a hybrid of human and beast, left with one large swan wing on his body.

Leading up to this visit, Maguire elucidates Laura's frustration, sadness, and subsequent detachment from reality through scenes that describe her inability to connect meaningfully to her family and their friends at home (business as usual at Ciardi's Fine Foods and Delicacies, plus cleaning house) as well as with her peers in the classroom (dealing with the braggy and stuck-up Maxine Sugargarten and Donna Flotard who don't fail to patronize her). Subject to this, she finds something of her own perhaps through senses that might be merely physical at first, yet reach towards other planes of existence that finally merge with the fantastical as the novel progresses - despite the fact that Laura ultimately cannot completely resolve and realize this magic in actuality. Even so, she creates beautiful literary narratives within her mind, she taps into her rebellious nature by being unafraid to criticize religion, for example, and she begins to lend a hand to something more animal - an owl saved, a mythical being cared for.

"Laura stood on the pavement, shivering. The snow circled like carnival ticker tape. All of the great city around her was engaged and alive, and Laura alone stood shoeless in the snow outside the warmly lit brownstones. The loneliness she felt was so keen it felt almost elegant. It cut her. Every snowflake on her arms felt like steel blades. There was no future and no past in such immediate pain." (p. 15)

"The music ended and the toilet below flushed again, and the house hunched on its mighty limestone thighs, holding tight against the assault of the storm. Through her closed eyes Laura saw snowflakes as if from grave eternity, spinning through the cold and lonely universe with no place to land. Particles of white nothing, with nothing to adhere to. Storybooks torn in scraps so small not a single whole word survived, just the orphaned alphabet." (p. 76)

With no one else to relate to, it is Hans, the swan-brother, who she encounters and briefly engages with to discover something of value within her tenuous existence. Might it be the experiences shared and memories made by finally feeling seen - and, in turn, her seeing a being apart from the mundanity of the everyday - that strengthens her? Stoicism (refreshingly feminine in A Wild Winter Swan) and a new-found self-regard instill themselves in Laura's character during and after her meeting with Hans, the swan-brother, ravaged by grief and a multifarious hunger that she willingly witnesses. With fortified character, she steps back out into the world and interacts with it at another angle, no longer at a distance but inside, working at tying together the tethers of her frayed life, not just those of a solitary imagination.