Swanna in Love: A Novel Jennifer Belle

 Book Excerpt:

"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 when 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 dragged to Vermont—to an artist colony where kids are not welcome and are forced to sleep in the back of the truck. At the same time, 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, intelligent city girl like Swanna might be unable to handle falling in love.

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."

Title: Swanna in Love
Author: Jennifer Belle
Publisher: Akashic Books, Ltd.
Reviewed By: Arlena Dean
Rating: Three
Review:
"Swanna in Love" by Jennifer Belle
My Thoughts:

'Swanna in Love' was quite a read that had me thinking, should I have chosen this particular reading?
I am not sure who I felt more sorrier for...Swanna and her little brother Madding? I had no feelings for Swanna's mother and her boyfriend, along with her father and his dominatrix, and that 30-some-year-old older man who had a family of his own who seemed not to care about being with this 14-year-old girl. He had to know she was young, which didn't stop him from bothering with Swanna. Now, for Swanna, who understood this was wrong, but living with someone like her mom and dad, what could one expect in this situation? I didn't find anything funny about the novel besides being sad and full of ickiness and wanting to kick some sense into all those so-called adults.

As I finished this read, I was left shaking my head and thinking what a coming of age-this story was for this poor girl, Swanna, from this dysfunctional family. Will she learn anything from it? Well, in the world we live in today, probably not. When one sees parents dating children and Swanna dating a parent, what else is there to think?