A Wild Winter Swan: A Novel

Laura Ciardi can name all the reasons she’s an outcast before she ever gets out of bed in the morning. She’s being raised by her aging grandparents thanks to a father who died before she was born and a mother in an institution. She’d rather read fairy tales to elementary school kids than make friends her own age. And, she’s not allowed to speak to the workmen in the house because her Nonna and Nonno don’t think it’s proper. Gregory Maguire’s A Wild Winter Swan reveals all of Laura’s eccentricities and her gifts over the course of a few snowy days near Christmas in 1960s New York.

Ciardi’s Fine Foods and Delicacies is a staple in Manhattan, but recent competition from another business is affecting their bottom line, so Mrs. Ciardi invites her sister Geneva, and Geneva’s rich new husband, to the Feast of the Seven Fishes. A dinner so opulent, Mr. Corm Kennedy—no relation—will have no choice but to throw in as an investor and help save the business from ruin. It is in the midst of the preparations for this feast, and on the night itself, that Laura is pushed to her limits. A mysterious visitor wings into the house and she must hide him or risk her family losing it all.

As Maguire has so often done before with books like Wicked and Mirror Mirror, A Wild Winter Swan is a delight of fantasy and the grotesquely beautiful in all of us.