The Swan: A Novel (Break Away Books)
Jim Cohee
Ten-year-old Aaron Cooper has witnessed the death of his younger sister, Pookie, and the trauma has left him unwilling to speak. Aaron copes with life's challenges by disappearing into his own imagination, envisioning being captain of the Kon Tiki, driving his sled in the snowy Klondike, and tiger hunting in India. He is guarded by secret friends like deposed Hungarian Count Blurtz Shemshoian and Blurtz's wonder dog, Nipper, who protect him from the creature from the Black Lagoon—who hides in Aaron's closet at night. The tales he constructs for himself, the real life stories he is witness to, and his mother's desperate efforts to bring her son back from the brink, all come to a head at an emotional family dinner. Set in Indianapolis in 1957, The Swan is a fictional memoir about enduring love and the weighty nature of mortality.
Product Details
About Jim Cohee
Reviews for The Swan: A Novel (Break Away Books)
Publishers Weekly
A surreal study of a grief observed indirectly, The Swan serves as a testament to the unbridled power of childhood vision, even and especially in the wake of tragedy.
Bloom Magazine
This is the principle pleasure of reading The Swan: Cohee delights in word play and humor that points to larger thematic concerns regarding the family's rift in the wake of a child's death.
andrewsbookclub.com
There's something ironic, compelling, and deeply sad about hearing a story of mortality and unspeakable loss unfold in the chirpy, attention-deficit, occasionally hilarious voice of a fourth-grader. . . . The voice isn't a gimmick —it's the point of the book, and it works brilliantly.
www.eastbayexpress.com
Funny, poignant and as endearing as its central character, The Swan is a wholly original tribute to childhood resilience.
San Jose Mercury News
Had Kurt Vonnegut, William Saroyan, J.D. Salinger, Carlos Castaneda, Raymond Carver and James Thurber ever gathered at a writer's workshop to co-author a short novel, the product might well have been The Swan.
Terre Haute Tribune Star
The secret protectors and spymasters who populate Aaron's disintegrating world in Cohee's The Swan are equally funny and heartbreaking. I've already reread this outstanding first novel.
Wapsipinicon Almanac