Child of a Swan

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.”

My review...

What a book. This is one you can’t put down. The synopsis makes this story sound as if it is about coming of age. I didn’t take it that way one bit. It might be classified as women’s fiction, but it is not just for young people.

Allyssa or Lyssa Barrett isn’t headstrong, she just cannot allow someone to make every possible decision for her, even if it is her father. Growing up with one parent can often be quite difficult, both for the child and the parent. Before Allyssa’s mother died, she hadn’t realized how much her father had never really been a part of her life. She didn’t think he ever would be, other than being overbearing.

This story begins with Allyssa as a child and it continues through her life. Burnett has somehow managed to make the shift between a memory of Allyssa as a child and Lyssa as an adult in her present life. I must tell you I do think some authors make this sort of thing very confusing. That doesn’t happen in this book. Somehow, without even a notation or font change in the book, the POV changes and yet I never questioned who was “speaking” so to speak. This has to be writing talent. It’s a very difficult thing to achieve and yet it worked as smooth as silk.

I might sound like I’m gushing here, but this is one of those books. The kind that don’t come along too often. It was definitely a 5-star read for me.

Read an excerpt...

“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.

about David Burnett...

We live near Charleston, South Carolina. I’ve always enjoyed the Carolina beaches. I now have the opportunity to walk on the beach almost every day and to photograph the ocean, the sea birds, and the marshes that I love.

I love photography, and I have photographed subjects as varied as prehistoric ruins on the islands of Scotland, star trails, sea gulls, and a Native American powwow. My wife and I have traveled widely in the United States and the United Kingdom. During trips to Scotland, we visited Crathes Castle, the ancestral home of the Burnett family near Aberdeen, and Kismul Castle on Barra, the home of my McNeil ancestors.

I went to school for much longer than I want to admit, and I have degrees in psychology and education. In an “earlier life” I was director of research for our state’s education department.

For more information about my other books or to join my mailing list go to 

www.BurnettsBooks.com,

or my Amazon author page at:  http://amazon.com/author/davidburnett

Buy Link

www.amazon.com/Child-Swan-David-Burnett-ebook/dp/B0F1JPPG87/

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