Dear Isabelle

by Jessica Swan

Just weeks after moving to Seattle as a freshman at the university, Isabelle's world of safety in Campion Tower vanishes. Everything starts to go wrong in the worst possible way for her after her dramatic breakup with her British boyfriend. And before long, she is too afraid to run.

240 pages, Paperback

First published May 30, 2007

About the author

JESSICA SWAN is an American novelist, playwright, librettist, and screenwriter. Known for crafting authentic, visually-striking stories for stage & film, Swan’s upcoming work includes musicals that employ dance as a function of the narrative. Rooted in myth and psychology, Swan’s dreamlike stories translate the performing & visual arts across multi-platforms to resonate in meaningful ways for today’s audience.

Swan conceived and wrote the libretto for "Sugar Hill: The Ellington/Strayhorn Nutcracker" (premiered December 2023 at the Auditorium Theater in Chicago), a dream-story told in dance, set to the music of Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn, with orchestrations/arrangements by Grammy Award-winner John Clayton and three-time Tony Award-nominee Larry Blank for a live 17-piece jazz orchestra and a 31-person cast choreographed by a team of world-class choreographers.
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"4 STARS. Like jazz itself, this show is just so darn American, infusing The Nutcracker with a boundless joy and optimism, all embodied in its extraordinary rhythm." - The Chicago Sun Times
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Swan holds a rhetoric degree from U.C. Berkeley and has published three books: The Big Book of Motivation Games (McGraw-Hill Companies) co-authored by a senior research psychologist as an addition to the best-selling The Big Book of Business Games series; Dear Isabelle (Harbor House Books); and Completely Lost (Odette Books). She is a former writer for Psychology Today magazine and has co-authored work published in the academic journal The Behavior Analyst. Her novels are featured on NPR, San Jose Mercury News, East Bay Times, and spotlighted in the Las Vegas Review-Journal as a must-read. Swan lives in New York City.
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Reviews

[Ben Briggs · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an outstanding work of fiction by new author Jessica Swan. Very well written and qutie intellectual. Soooo many works of fiction these days are just plain dumb! I enjoyed it but I think, in a very general sense, that it would appeal to women somewhat more than to men.

I cannot wait to see what Ms. Swan's next work will be!

[Auggie Swanger · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing book! I LOVED IT!

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Psychological thriller about a first year college student at a Jesuit college in Seattle. She's fighting with a boyfriend in London by email, breaks up with him and getting unfriendly notes on her door, allegedly from him.

She's actually delusional, inventing people in her life due to stress which originally arose when her Mom was going through chemo treatments.

New, different.

[Carolynn (Molly.Groot) Evans · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the “rules” of good fiction writing is that the first sentence ought to grab the reader. As a dedicated rule-breaker on my own path, the first line in Dear Isabelle was especially appealing: “I love to start sentences with ‘and’. It’s so perfect, so easy, so against the rules.” Excellent! Hooked completely by the first line, in the presence of a fellow trail-blazer, it was impossible to put the book down. Emotional thriller Dear Isabelle by new novelist Jessica Swan is fascinating, as long as the reader avoids the epilogue.

....
Even the sometimes immature and awkward writing suits the character particularly well, whether purposely or accidental. In a different narrative, it might not work. The uneasy clomping back and forth from intuitive description to childish explanations would be distracting. In this? Perfection.

Although woven fluently with mythological and astrological asides, Dear Isabelle is well-grounded in today’s world. The fear and tension is well executed. With the notable exception of the unnecessary muddying of the story in the epilogue, Dear Isabelle is an amazing breakthrough of a novel.

full review on curledup.com

[Bethany Rattray]

Very boring. Don't bother.