Title: Swan
Author: Sidura Ludwig
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing
Pages: 298
Genre: Middle Grade, Inspired by true events, biography, fiction
Rating: 5/5 Stars
Review:

I had never heard of Anna Swan before. Anna Swan, the little girl who grew to be very tall. The little girl that stood at 4 feet 6 inches at the age of 4 years old. This novel is a reimagining of Anna Swan’s life as a 12 year old girl. I was very interested to learn that Anna Swan was a real person. This book was so well done, the writing was unlike anything I’ve ever seen before, and it was so fun to read. The character development from Anna Swan as she struggles with the changes that her body goes through was really well done.

Alright, so I want to do a little bit of comparing and contrasting here. As an aspiring writer, I’d like to do a case study for 2 stories that have a similar premise. There’s a Netflix movie called Tall Girl and it follows a 16yr old girl named Jodi who stands at 6’1. And then we have Anna Swan who (in this book) is only 12yrs old, and stands at 6’11. Both of these stories have a similar storyline, it’s woman versus herself and her internal conflict with her own body. Both girls are unhappy with how tall they are, and wish to be shorter. I would like to talk about the emotional impact of each story and how much I resonated with each character. Why? Because it’s my blog and my book review and I do what I want. Hehe. Enjoy.

I didn’t like the Tall Girl movie for a number of reasons, mostly because I couldn’t sympathize with the main character. As a 16yr old myself, I stand at around 5’7, but I think I can still say that her story and her insecurities don’t really resonate with me as much as they do with Anna. Both tall girls are shy and reserved. They also tend to slouch because of their height, and they both also have big hands. In Anna Swans case, it’s the 1800s, and the people of her small town haven’t see anything like her before. One of the businessman in her town wants to put her on display at an exhibition in Halifax. Anna is marketed as the “Nova Scotia Giantess”.

I find that I connected with Anna’s story more because we see Anna go through a lot of changes. We see her growing and her needs that come with being tall. She constantly needs her bed lengthened, she has to sit on the floor when eating because the dining table cannot accommodate her, she needs her desk at school raised because her legs are too long to fit and it is causing her back and neck pain. In the Tall Girl movie all we get are her complaints and we don’t actually get to see her struggling with anything severe. For Anna Swan, she actually worries. She worries what will happen to her, if she never stops growing, or if there’s anything wrong with her body. In the Tall Girl movie with Jodi, some kids at school bully her a little bit and then she gets sad, but that’s all we see. I think the Tall Girl movie had a lot of wasted potential for a good story. I’m not saying that being tall isn’t a valid insecurity or anything like that, I just think that way Jodie’s character was written makes it seem fake.

Anna Swan is also called a “daftie” and an “elephant” because she’s so shy, and people think that she’s not smart because she doesn’t talk. When she does talk, they are taken aback because she has a voice like that of a man. Small things like that were crucial to Anna’s character development, and that’s something that we don’t get with Jodi.

Okay that’s it for the analysis. I hope that also tells you about the book as well, if you can’t tell, I really liked the Swan book compared to the Tall Girl movie. I would highly recommend Swan to anyone that disliked Tall Girl, or thought that the Tall Girl story wasn’t satisfying. And if you haven’t watched Tall Girl, well, I recommend this to you too. You can learn something new, and fall in love with Sidura Ludwig’s Anna Swan.

So who is Anna Swan? If you’ve made it this far into my review, I think you deserve to know a bit about her.

(Information taken from the biography of Anna Swan on page 291 of Swan)

~ Anna Swan was born in Millbrook Nova Scotia weighing almost twice the weight of an average newborn (13-18lbs)
~ In 1851 Anna’s parents took her to Halifax for exhibition and toured her around Nova Scotia to make money. At this time she was 4 years old and measured 4’6″.
~ Anna started to become a teacher when she was 15 in 1861 but gave up because it was hard for her
~ Anna was approached by P. T. Barnum, the American showman with a circus, museum, art gallery, and zoo. She left for New York to work at his museum at the age of 17.
~ Annas shows at the museum consisted of playing the piano, acting in plays, and reading poetry. She was paid very well, twenty three dollars in gold.
~ Anna travelled all over the United States with P. T. Barnum. During her touring she met her future husband, and she got married in London, England. Annas wedding dress was a gift from Queen Victoria.
~ When travelling with P. T. Barnum, he advertised that Anna was 8ft tall when in reality she was 7’11”
~ Anna later had two children, one died in childbirth weighing 18 pounds and measured 27 inches. The second was the largest newborn ever recorded in medical history, weighing 24 pounds and measuring 30 inches in length. The second child lived for only 11 hours.
~ Anna died of heart failure on August 5, 1888 at the age of 41.

Last but not least, here is the official synopsis from Nimbus!

A brilliant and tender middle grade novel-in-verse from the award-winning author of You Are Not What We Expected, reimagining the childhood of Nova Scotia Giantess Anna Swan.
Before she became the “The Giantess from Nova Scotia” and travelled the globe with notorious showman P. T. Barnum, Anna Swan was a young girl growing up near the rural town of Tatamagouche, desperately trying to fit into a world for which she was literally too big. In her debut middle grade novel-in-verse, award-winning author Sidura Ludwig imagines a pivotal period in Anna’s childhood, as she struggled to find acceptance in a community that saw her as other.
When twelve-year-old, seven-foot-tall Anna’s family moves to her grandmother’s farm in Central New Annan, she is forced to attend a new school, abandon the bedroom she once shared with her beloved sister, Maggie, and face bullies young and old. She worries she’ll never stop growing, and dreams of dainty boots that fit and church pews that don’t topple under her weight. Of a world that sees her as she sees herself: a gentle girl who loves to read books beneath the trees.
When Anna discovers a solution that will help her stop growing and get her family out of debt, she agrees to exhibit herself as a curiosity in the big city of Halifax. But her giant heart will be tested as she tries to balance her devotion to her family with her desire for normalcy.
A story of faith, family, and learning to love the body you’re in, SWAN is a modern classic, an impeccably researched and brilliantly imagined story of a woman who has captivated the world for over two centuries. Features an author’s note about the real Anna Swan chronicling Anna’s later life, and the little that is known about why she grew so tall (almost 8 feet as an adult), as well as a brief history of the region where Anna grew up.

Alrighty. Well that was a long one. I hope you enjoyed, and I hope you check out Swan! I recommend this book with a big 5 out of 5 stars.