On Tour 01/25/24-02/26/24 “Swanna In Love” by Jennifer Belle

Release Date: January 30, 2024

About The Book:

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 pick-up 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.

About The Author:

Jennifer Belle is the best-selling author of four novels, Going Down (which was named best debut novel by Entertainment Weekly and optioned for the screen twenty-seven times), High Maintenance, Little Stalker, The Seven Year Bitch, and Animal Stackers, a picture book for children (illustrated by David McPhail). Her stories and essays have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, the Independent (London), Harper’s Bazaar, Ms., BlackBook, the New York Observer, Post Road, and many anthologies.

Social Media:

Instagram: https://instagram.com/jenniferbellewriter

Book Blurbs:

“Swanna in Love is an addictive read, a book as genuinely funny as it is transgressive. Jennifer Belle captures the bravado and vulnerability of adolescence in a voice that jumps off the first page and ventures into some dangerous territory.― Tom Perrotta, author of Tracy Flick Can’t Win

“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

Bloggers On Tour:

Jan. 25th- Nurse Bookie https://instagram.com/nurse_bookie

Jan. 27th- Bookish Life Of Kels https://instagram.com/bookishlifeofkels

Jan. 28th- Plains Reading https://instagram.com/plains_reading

Jan. 29th- Lindas Book Obsession https://www.facebook.com/lindasbookobsession/

Jan. 30th- Reading With Nicole https://instagram.com/reading_with_nicole

Jan. 31st- Shooks Books https://instagram.com/shook_sbooks

Feb. 4th- Books And Beabulls https://instagram.com/books_and_beabulls

Feb. 9th- Marilyn Goncalves https://instagram.com/marilynjgon

Feb. 15th- Sarahs Bookish Reviews https://instagram.com/sarahs.bookish.reviews

Feb. 15th- Reading Late Into The Night https://instagram.com/reading.late.into.the.night

Feb. 16th- Coffee Break Book Reviews https://instagram.com/coffee.break.book.reviews