Stories borrowing from fantasy, fairy tales and fables swirl around teen sisters Blanca and Roja del Cisne--cautionary tales all. "Because when there is a family in which one of every two daughters grows an ink-black bill and a pale-feathered neck and snow-bright wings, people like to think they know why."In Blanca & Roja, Mexican-American author Anna-Marie McLemore (The Weight of Feathers; When the Moon Was Ours) tells a story that readers will, at first, likely interpret as straight-up fairy tale. All the elements are there: two sisters (one fair and gentle, one dark and fierce); a curse; handsome "princes." But McLemore takes the fairy tale mold and stretches and reforms it to suit her own artistic needs.
Although the sisters, whose last name means "of the swans" in Spanish, have always known that one of them is destined to be turned into a swan, they are determined to fight this curse. As the legend goes, the swans arrive soon after the younger of the two del Cisne girls turns 15. But, at an early age, sweet Blanca began feeding her fierce younger sister herbs and berries and white rose petals to sweeten her nature and confuse the swans. She herself took the jagged-leafed herbs, the mouth-puckering berries and the red rose petals. "If the swans can't tell us apart," she says, "they can't decide which of us to take."
Now, Roja's 15th birthday has come and gone, and the swan bevy has not shown up. However, a yearling bear and a baby swan--a cygnet--have appeared. Are these creatures the nahuales their mother used to tell them about, humans that can transform into animal forms? When the animals disappear and two missing local teens (one a boy, the other gender fluid) reappear, the possibility becomes closer to a certainty. Tension grows between the close sisters as they begin to question each other's actions and motives.
It's not until they give themselves "to what [they] feared" that the curse shifts: "Even in losing ourselves, we had stolen power away from los cisnes," Blanca says. "There had to be something for us in that, even if it was only the sharp edges of our nightmare being worn smooth."
What sets McLemore's writing apart in the magical realism genre is the way her rich, beautifully ornamented language is shot through with a vein of proud feminism and the importance of owning one's identity. Roja says, "I was neither the selfless mermaid nor the ruthless nixie. I was a girl who would never exist in a fairy tale, not just because of the brown of my body but because of my heart, neither pure enough to be good nor cruel enough to be evil. I was a girl lost in the deep, narrow space between the two forms girls were allowed to take."
In the end, Blanca & Roja is about, as Blanca says, "giving up the stories we thought we already knew." --Emilie Coulter, freelance writer and editor
Shelf Talker: Magical realism weaves through McLemore's Swan Lake and "Snow-White and Rose Red" inspired story of two sisters fighting an ancient curse in which one of them will be turned into a swan.