Many, many books for young people have to do with orphans or young people who have been adopted. The attraction that these plotlines hold make a lot of sense to me. What tween or teen, looking around them with newly worldly eyes, doesn't wonder how they ended up in this family? No one in the family understands them, no one makes any sense, no one "gets" them. Perhaps there is someone out there who does.
Caroline B. Cooney's newest young adult novel, Three Black Swans, fits right in. This is territory that Cooney has successfully covered before, notably in her novel The Face on the Milk Carton, in which young Janie sees a younger "missing" photo of herself on the side of a milk carton in the school lunchroom, setting off a search for the truth. I lost myself for a day or two in that story almost 20 years ago, and so I picked up Three Black Swans at the library last week.
If you think about it, orphans or adopted kids figure heavily in literary history--think Oliver Twist, Jane Eyre, Anne of Green Gables, or Harry Potter. And for Christians, the idea that we don't really belong here, that we are strangers, aliens, not of this world, is a comfort. We don't feel comfortable, things aren't right, and that's okay, because we really belong to someone else, in another relationship.
In Three Black Swans, two cousins attempt a hoax, pretending to be long-lost identical twins. It turns out that they are on to something, and when the video ends up on YouTube, it opens up a whole world of possibilities that they had not anticipated.
While this is not Newbery-award-winning material, it is an interesting plot and a well-rounded exploration of the motivations of all of the characters involved. No one is innocent, but there are ways to feel sympathy toward every character. One of the clunkier aspects: while the author intends to show an awareness of the use of technology (texting, internet, etc) and the generation gap in that area between parents and children, sometimes it feels too self-conscious.
As a young teen, the thought that someone out there who looks like me, thinks like me, and was still considered beautiful and talented would have been a pretty good fantasy! This book feeds that fantasy, but it goes a step beyond it to meditate a bit on love and forgiveness. It may not be great literature, but it is worthwhile entertainment for its target audience.
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