Swanna in love

Belle (High Maintenance) returns with a funny and intimate portrait of a precocious 14-year-old girl whose family life is ruptured in 1982. At summer camp, Swanna is relieved to be free from the stress caused by her parents' recent separation. But when her mother, a self-involved poet, pulls Swanna from the bus back home to New York City, she's horrified to discover that she's not going to see her Upper West Side apartment anytime soon. Swanna and her nine-year-old brother, Madding, are heading north to Vermont with her mother and her mother's new boyfriend, an Elvis-obsessed artist named Borislav, who has been awarded a spot in an artists' colony there. Children aren't allowed in the colony, however, so Swanna and Madding are forced to sleep in the bed of Borislav's truck. Unable to reach her dad in New York, Swanna sees herself as the only adult in the situation: "I hated when strangers talked to me like a child.... I took the subway every day with lunatics." One day at a bowling alley, she meets a man named Dennis, a 37-year-old married doctor and father of two. A few days later, Dennis picks Swanna up while she's on an angry walk near the artists' colony, and she turns up her charm, recognizing him as her way out. Soon, they've embarked on an affair as head-spinning as it is ill-considered. 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. Agent: Douglas Stewart, Sterling Lord Literistic. (Jan.)

A neglected teenager has an affair with an older man in this unconventional coming-of-age story. In 1982, 14-year-old Swanna Swain is summoned off the bus that's meant to take her home from camp to New York City. Five hours later, her mother, Val, arrives in a pickup truck driven by her new boyfriend, Borislav, to take Swanna to Vermont instead. Once there, Swanna and her younger brother, Madding, sleep outside the artists' colony where their mother is crashing. (The colony doesn't allow children.) As an escape from her situation, Swanna embarks on an affair with Dennis Whitson, an obstetrician she meets at the local bowling alley. The novel spans only a few days, from the end of camp to the beginning of the school year, and it captures that end-of-summer feeling that is also associated with the end of childhood. As in Lolita, the first-person narration is so compelling and seductive that it implicates the reader, making the relationship's more sordid moments all the more horrifying. Still, the book never reduces Swanna to two-dimensional victim, nor does it settle for facile moralizing. What emerges, instead, is a complex and bittersweet coming-of-age novel. Swanna is a big reader and a precocious city child who quotes Eloise to herself when she's stressed. As a character, she is up there with the icons she admires, like J.D. Salinger's Holden Caulfield and Judy Blume's Katherine Danzinger. Her incisive perspective is heartbreaking as often as it's hilarious. The 1980s settings--the writers' colony, suburban Vermont, and New York City--are brilliantly evoked, with a teenager's eye toward skewering the excesses and absurdities of bohemians and the bourgeoise alike. Throughout the book, Belle's dialogue is a highlight--pitch-perfect and often laugh-out-loud funny. Both a riotous page-turner and a thoughtful examination of girlhood, vulnerability, and sexual power. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.