Swanna in Love
It's the summer of 1982 and fourteen-year-old Swanna Swain is the only one left at camp. The place is a ghost town by the time her mother Val finally shows up six hours late--stoned and radiant--in a Ford pickup driven by Borislav, her new young Russian lover. Assuming she is headed home to her air-conditioned Upper West Side apartment, Swanna and her lovable younger brother Madding are instead dragged to Vermont--to an artist colony where kids are not welcome and they are forced to sleep in the back of the truck, while Val is cozy inside the house with the Russian.
Then Swanna meets Dennis, a handsome married father of two, at a bowling alley, and, knowing a thing or two about seduction from Judy Blume, her best friend at camp, and her own parents' many affairs--she sets out to convince Dennis to help her. But love seldom obeys rules, and even a tough, smart, city girl like Swanna might not be able to handle falling in love.
Best-selling novelist Jennifer Belle returns with a kind of inverse Lolita that explores adolescent desire from the girl's point of view. In turns hilarious and wildly shocking, Swanna in Love will keep your feathers ruffled and the pages gliding by.
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Become an affiliateJennifer Belle is the author of four critically acclaimed, widely translated novels, including Going Down, for which she was named best debut novelist of the year by Entertainment Weekly, and High Maintenance, a national bestseller. Her stories and essays have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Independent magazine, Ms., Harper's Bazaar, Black Book, and many anthologies. She lives in New York City.
Oh, how I loved the whip-smart Swanna Swain. I loved the way she effortlessly lied to people. I love how much she wanted things, good and bad. With Swanna in Love, Jennifer Belle has given us the other side of Nabokov's Lolita--the misunderstood teenage temptress who desperately wants an ice cream sandwich, a comfortable bed to sleep in. Love. Sometimes, it hurts what happens to her. I inhaled this book.--Marcy Dermansky, author of Hurricane Girl
Only Jennifer Belle could write a character like the utterly original and hilariously fierce Swanna, who navigates her way out of the benign neglect of an eighties New York City post-divorce childhood with her beloved brother in tow--a lifetime of growth and change--in the course of a summer. Swanna in Love is a coming-of-age novel unlike anything I've ever read--beautiful, funny, and heartbreakingly true. I loved, and believed, every word of it.--Laura Zigman, author of Small World
Utterly delightful. By turns deeply funny and profoundly moving. The most pitch-perfect portrait of adolescence since The Catcher in the Rye. I loved this novel so!--Joanna Rakoff, author of My Salinger Year
A collection of letters invites readers into the prolific author's life and thoughts . . . An interesting barometer of Oates' development as a writer over thirty years.-- "Kirkus Reviews"
Whip-smart dialogue and a convincing teenage perspective add heft to this comic novel. Belle breaks hearts with the story of Swanna's first love.-- "Publishers Weekly"
This book is incredible...Hysterically funny and dark.--Robert Siegel, creator of Welcome to Chippendales
Stranded in Vermont with a neglectful mother and her boyfriend, Swanna, a precocious 14-year-old, pursues a married man whom she sees as her ticket back to New York.-- "New York Times Book Review"
With the publication of Swanna in Love from Akashic Books, author Jennifer Belle presents a kind of inverse Lolita that deftly explores adolescent desire from the girl's point of view. Original, hilarious, wildly shocking and iconoclastic, Swanna in Love is an inherently fascinating, compulsive page turner of a novel that is highly recommended for community and college/university library Contemporary Literary Fiction collections.-- "Midwest Book Review"