Child of a Swan

By: David Burnett

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Rejecting her father’s master plan for her life, sixteen-year old Alyssia Barrett faces the world alone.

Lyssa, it is your destiny.
Her father did not use those exact words, but he might as well have.
Lyssa Barrett was born into a family of writers.
Few authors have landed more titles on national bestseller lists than has her father. Her oldest brother walks in his father’s footsteps, her second brother is a published poet, and the third a Broadway playwright. The four men, the “Barrett Band,” as they are called, are a force in American literary circles, the “first family of American letters.”
And Lyssa is meant to join them.
Lyssa, the child who would rather decipher a math puzzle than unravel an anagram, prove a geometric theorem than pen a short story, and master nonparametric statistics than devise plot twists for a novel. Lyssa is destined to be a writer.
So her father believes, and since no one crosses her father, it is what all who know the family expect. Of all her father’s children, only Lyssa is willing to rebel. It is a trait which sets her apart from the others to such a degree that she questions whether she is even truly a Barrett.
Conflict is inevitable.
In middle school, Lyssa is selected to participate in an honors math program. Her father enrolls her in a summer writing seminar. She insists on taking math at a local college. He is adamant that she enroll in advanced composition. She presents a paper at a national mathematics convention. Her father hails the publication of a short story she has written.
Writing is her calling, her father insists, and, looking beyond high school, he chooses the college she will attend, he identifies the subject in which she will major, and he selects the very courses he will allow her to take.
Although not yet seventeen years old, she realizes that unless she puts distance between herself and her father, she will not escape what he calls “her destiny” and she calls the “Barrett curse.” Closing the door to childhood behind her, she steps into the world, intent on becoming an adult on her own terms.

If you enjoy coming of age stories, you will fall in love with this absorbing account of how Lyssa strives to come to terms with her past as she builds life on her own terms.

AI generated narration

The voice was so off I couldn’t get very far. None of the feeling was in the right place. Truly horrible!