Newbery Wayback Machine: The Summer of the Swans, by Betsy Byars (1971)

 

Fourteen-year-old Sara Godfrey is having a difficult time, in a way that I think a lot of people her age -- or who have ever been her age -- would understand. She's hyper-conscious of what she considers to be her plain looks and unpopularity at school; her emotions are swinging wildly; and she's struggling in her relationships with her family. This family is a fragile unit -- Sara's mom is dead, and her beaten-down father works out of town, and only sees them on the weekends. The primary adult in Sara's life is her Aunt Willie, who loves her, but can be abrasive and difficult. Then there are her siblings, her attractive and popular older sister, Wanda, and her little brother, Charlie, who does not speak, and has some sort of intellectual disability -- his precise diagnosis, if he's ever been given one, is never stated in the book, but his symptoms as described might place him on the autism spectrum. 

All of this makes Sara self-centered, in a manner that nearly every teenager experiences at one point or another. But one morning, Charlie is missing, and Sara begins searching for him; in the process, she begins to challenge her assumptions about herself, her family, and the other people around her.

For a book whose main plot is "the race to find a missing child," The Summer of the Swans is strangely subdued. It's a character study, rather than a thriller, and the plot elements exist largely to bring out different facets of Sara and the people around her. I think the book succeeds wildly on those terms -- I felt like each person in the book was someone who might well exist. The change in Sara's character also felt plausible and right to me. It's the perfect blend of "enough, but not too much," especially given the book's compressed timeframe. (It's really more like The Forty-Eight Hours of the Swans.)

I also loved the lyricism of the language. The descriptions of the swans themselves, both on the pond near the book's beginning, and in flight near the end, are lushly poetic without becoming highfalutin. I was also struck by the passage near the end, in which Sara compares life to a series of steps, which are different for each person, and on which each person is making different progress. I wish I'd written it, which is the best compliment I know how to pay.

The Summer of the Swans is almost fifty years old now, and there are a handful of passing cultural references of questionable sensitivity, which it might be worth mentioning to a child reader before giving them the book. It's a beautiful jewel of a novel, though, one which may not be a huge crowd-pleaser, but which rewards a thoughtful, introspective reader. The 1971 awards drew from a crowded field (including not only the three Honor books, Knee-Knock Rise, Enchantress from the Stars, and Sing Down the Moon, but also Frog and Toad Are Friends, Runaway Ralph, and The Trumpet of the Swans). I think The Summer of the Swans was a perfectly good choice for the Newbery even in that company, which is high praise indeed.