The Wild Winter Swan

 Hans Christian Anderson wrote a fairy tale about wild swans. A King with 12 children remarried. The evil stepmother put a spell on the 11 sons of the King turning them into swans during the day. She forced the brothers/swans to fly away. The evil stepmother tried to put a spell on the sister of the 11 brothers but her brothers got her away to a safe place. In the safe place the sister learned that if she knit the fibers of nettles into clothing and put the clothing on the swans the spell would be reversed and they would not be swans anymore. She also had to keep a vow of silence during the construction of the clothes or her brothers would die. The nettles stung her hands but she kept working in silence. People who saw her working asked what she was doing. She did not answer because if she did her brothers would die. A rumor started that she was a witch. She was about to be burned at the stake. She will still knitting the 11th jacket when she was taken to be burned at the stake. Just then her brothers, the swans, flew in. She threw the jackets at her brothers. One by one the swans became brothers except for the youngest brother. He became human but kept one swan wing. In the book The Wild Winter Swan, Gregory Macguire (who also wrote Wicked and other novels about fairy tales) has the boy with one swan wing fly into a house in New York City in the 1960's just before Christmas. A fifteen year old girl pulls him into her room and nurses him back to health. Her name is Laura. She lives with her paternal grandparents who immigrated from Italy. Her father and brother are dead and her mother is too ill to take care of her. Laura helps the swan boy without anyone in the house finding out. The story was told slowly and sometimes seemed to drag on. The story is told exclusively by Laura. I would have liked to know what the swan boy was thinking sometimes.