Child of A Swan by David Burnett is a women's fiction book on tour with Goddess Fish Promotions.
BLURB: Rejecting her father’s master plan for her life, sixteen-year-old Alyssia Barrett faces the world alone.
"Lyssa, it is your destiny."
Her father did not use those exact words, but he might as well have.
Lyssa Barrett was born into a family of writers.
Few authors have landed more titles on national bestseller lists than has her father. Her oldest brother walks in his father’s footsteps, her second brother is a published poet, and the third a Broadway playwright. The four men, the “Barrett Band,” as they are called, are a force in American literary circles, the “first family of American letters.”
And Lyssa is meant to join them.
Lyssa, the child who would rather decipher a math puzzle than unravel an anagram, prove a geometric theorem than pen a short story, and master nonparametric statistics than devise plot twists for a novel. Lyssa is destined to be a writer.
So her father believes, and since no one crosses her father, it is what all who know the family expect. Of all her father’s children, only Lyssa is willing to rebel. It is a trait which sets her apart from the others to such a degree that she questions whether she is even truly a Barrett.
Conflict is inevitable.
In middle school, Lyssa is selected to participate in an honors math program. Her father enrolls her in a summer writing seminar. She insists on taking math at a local college. He is adamant that she enroll in advanced composition. She presents a paper at a national mathematics convention. Her father hails the publication of a short story she has written.
Writing is her calling, her father insists, and, looking beyond high school, he chooses the college she will attend, he identifies the subject in which she will major, and he selects the very courses he will allow her to take.
Although not yet seventeen years old, she realizes that unless she puts distance between herself and her father, she will not escape what he calls “her destiny” and she calls the “Barrett curse.” Closing the door to childhood behind her, she steps into the world, intent on becoming an adult on her own terms.
If
you enjoy coming-of-age stories, you will fall in love with this absorbing
account of how Lyssa strives to come to terms with her past as she builds life
on her own terms.
FIRST CHAPTER: Child of A Swan opens with Marta bringing her mother, Lyssa, a copy of Edward Barrett's latest book —a memoir that delves into the life Lyssa has left behind.
KEEP READING: A lot of ground is covered in the opening chapter. We meet Marta and Lyssa, but others are simply names in the narrative. This was a wise choice by the author. The first chapter is heavy on emotions and blends the present day and the past as some backstory explores Lyssa's feelings about her father, the new book, and the decisions she has made. I'm definitely curious, and I am looking for the writing to tighten up to increase the tension.
Read an excerpt!
Marta opened the door even before I rang the bell.
“Hi, Mom.” She smiled as she stepped back, allowing me to enter, and, standing in our entrance hall, she held out a copy of Edward Barrett’s new release, And Then She Was Gone.
“You found one,” I exclaimed.
The commentator on NPR had declared that copies of Barrett’s new title would be snapped up so quickly on release day they would be difficult to find. Since I had read every book he had ever published, I had planned to dash out tonight after dinner in search of one. After all, the review in Sunday’s Times had concluded with an irresistible teaser, “And Then She Was Gone is written as a letter of apology to Barrett’s daughter—an apology Barrett cannot deliver in person since he has not seen her in well over a decade, and he does not even know if she is still alive.”
An apology.
I’d shaken my head in disbelief.
Barrett had published an apology.
To his daughter.
To me.…
Marta’s eyes remained fixed on me. “The book was shelved as a memoir, Mom.”
A memoir.
Not contemporary fiction like his other work.
I bit my lower lip.
My father had written about us, him and me, our lives, our relationship. The prepublication press releases had made this clear. But the idea, the hope, my prayer, that my father had couched our lives in plausibly deniable fiction seemed to be nothing more than a pipedream, wishful thinking.
No, in place of fiction, he had written a memoir.
I rolled my eyes and sank into a chair in the entrance hall.
I slowly flipped the pages, scanning the contents.
Readers assume a memoir to be factual, a window through which to view the author’s life and to understand their experience, a veritable information dump from the author’s eidetic memory, a memory that records every event with perfect accuracy and objectivity.
And that was the kick.
Even if an author is one of the few who has been blessed with such a perfect memory, even if the author has supplemented his recollections by searching records and interviewing family and friends, a memoir is inherently selective, slanted, tinted by the author’s beliefs and needs and fears, designed to make some point, more akin to an edited video than to a live stream, to a Photo-Shopped image than to a raw file.
How had my father edited our story? What events had he included in full? Which ones had he cropped? What incidents were presented with clear, crisp detail? Which scenes had he underexposed or deleted?
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1 comment:
This looks like a fantastic read. Thanks for sharing.
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