'When I was a little girl, I hurt my arm and my mother took me to a different doctor, one I’d never been to before. He called me an ugly duckling. My mother laughed when he said it but I didn’t mind. Just as long as I had been hatched from a swan’s egg. Because, then, eventually, I would turn into a swan and nothing else would matter.'
This is seventeen-year-old Ruth's story of her determination to find a place for herself in a world very different from the one she had imagined as a child.' (Publication summary)
Epigraph: 'he saw beneath him his own form, no longer that of a plump ugly grey bird - it was that of a swan.
It matters not to have been born in a duck yard, if one has been hatched from a swan's egg. – Hans Christian Andersen, 'The Ugly Duckling'
