A Warning About Swans, with its lush language and modern themes, is a relevant, whimsical fairy tale in verse.
Sixteen-year-old, "fury" red-haired Hilde is a "human girl/ who is not a girl." She used to wear a cloak of starlight bestowed upon her by the All-Father god Odin, which transformed her into a swan and gave her "the gift/ of greeting/ death"--a gift that was a burden from which she longed to be free. Now she is only a "wish-maiden" who brings to life 18-year-old Baron Maximilian von Richter's dreams of "fields of rubies" and "fistfuls of pearls" while he teaches her to be human. Von Richter brings Hilde to the court at Munich, where she meets Jewish nonbinary teen artist Franz Mendelsohn. The two grow closer as von Richter's grip on Hilde grows tighter, and Hilde soon realizes that the freedom she once longed for may have been taken from her again.
R.M. Romero (The Ghosts of Rose Hill) incorporates contemporary themes of self-acceptance, patriarchal culture, and gender into an original fairy tale that is immersive and picturesquely written. Romero plays with spacing between words and line length to bolster her storytelling; for example, to mimic climbing a pine tree--"branch by branch, step by step"--she places each word on its own line. She further creates striking imagery with lyrical language: "I untangled its soul/ from the net of muscles and skin." These elements inject whimsy and charm into a relatable fairy tale that affectively explores modern issues. --Lana Barnes, freelance reviewer and proofreader