Wild Swans

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About Wild Swans

Product Description The summer before Ivy's senior year is going to be golden―all bonfires, barbeques, and spending time with her best friends. For once, she will just get to be. No summer classes, none of Granddad's intense expectations to live up to the family name. For generations, the Milbourn women have lead extraordinary lives―and died young and tragically. Granddad calls it a legacy, but Ivy considers it a curse. Why else would her mother have run off and abandoned her as a child? But when her mother unexpectedly returns home with two young daughters in tow, all of the stories Ivy wove to protect her heart start to unravel. The very people she once trusted now speak in lies. And all of Ivy's ambition and determination cannot defend her against the secrets of the Milbourn past… From School Library Journal Gr 10 Up—Seventeen-year-old Ivy Milbourn feels just adequate. For the past three generations, young women of the Milbourn family have been blessed—and cursed—with sparkling artistic talent. A poetess, an artist, and a vocalist—they lived and died tragically short lives. At least, Ivy thought her mother was as good as dead after she abandoned Ivy as a toddler. Raised by her loving but unknowingly overbearing grandfather, the teen is beginning to feel the demands of the Milbourn legacy. And now, her mother Erica comes home, bringing Ivy's two half sisters with her. Erica could not deal with the pressure to become the next amazingly talented Milbourn—she is nasty, hurtful, and awful. The protagonist's perfect no-pressure summer comes to a screeching halt as she now has to navigate some serious emotional waters. Ivy gets to know her sisters, has her first serious boyfriend, and begins to assert herself in her interactions with others. She may not be an artistically talented Milbourn girl, but she has emotional strength to be envied by all who know her. She knows she is not okay yet, but she "will be." The language is very frank and the discussions of sexuality even more so. Underage drinking is viewed as expected and inevitable. Ivy's incredibly loyal friends are realistic, but some traits seem contrived to help support other characters. VERDICT A strong coming-of-age story for most YA collections.—Lisa Crandall, formerly at the Capital Area District Library, Holt, MI Review Ivy is sensitively portrayed, her struggles believably met at every turn... For anyone who suffers from too-heavy expectations, Ivy will ring true in this engaging, nearly flawless coming-of-age novel. - Kirkus (starred review) A strong coming-of-age novel. - School Library Journal About the Author Jessica Spotswood lives in Washington, DC, with her husband and works as a children’s library associate. Her novel Wild Swans was chosen for ALA’s 2017 Amelia Bloomer List. Visit jessicaspotswood.com. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter One Granddad says all the Milbourn women are extraordinary. Amelia, the Shakespeare professor up at the college, says cursed. Judy, the bookseller down at the Book Addict, says crazy. Here in Cecil, girls are still expected to be nice. Quiet. All sugar. Maybe a little spice. But not us. We Milbourn women are a complicated lot. The Milbourn legacy goes back four generations. Folks were just starting to drive over from Baltimore and Washington, DC, to buy my great-great-grandmother's portraits when she tried outracing a train in her new roadster. It stalled on the tracks and she and her two youngest were killed instantly. My great-grandmother Dorothea survived and went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for her love poems―but she was murdered by the woman whose husband she'd been sleeping with for inspiration. Grandmother painted famous, haunting landscapes of the Bay, but the year before I was born, she walked out the back door and down to the water and drowned herself. My mother had a voice like a siren, but she ran away from home the second time she got knocked up, and we haven't seen her sinc