The True Tale of a Giantess: The Story of Anna Swan

Tale of a True Giantess is told as a first-person narrative by the giantess herself, Anna Swan. She describes her life in rural Nova Scotia: how people talked about her, how she loved the outdoors, how she always felt loved by her parents and how they took her to county fairs to show her off, how people sometimes treated her inappropriately as though she were older because she was taller, and how they were sometimes unkind.

Anna speaks of her dreams of travel and adventure and a place to fit in. At 17, she convinced her parents to let her travel to New York to accept P.T. Barnum’s invitation to join the Gallery of Wonders in his museum. The members of the Gallery group traveled, including a trip to England where Anna had tea with Queen Victoria. She also fell in love and married. Some years later, she and her husband retired to a farm in Seville, Ohio, where they built a house with a tall side and a short side so that everyone fit.

Anne Renaud is something of an expert on Anna Swann. She has written a previous book on Swan, The Extraordinary Life of Anna Swan (Cape Breton University Press, 2013) cited in “Author’s Sources”. For this telling of Anna’s story, Renault has created a pleasant tale, as if Anna is speaking to young friends about her life. Her comparison of herself to things in her surroundings (“By the time I was four years old, I had sprouted higher that the Queen Anne’s lace that swayed in our meadow. Higher than our sheep. Higher than our rain barrel.”) helps to evoke her rural Nova Scotian home.

Anna ‘s conflict with her parents about joining Mr. Barnum’s Gallery of Wonders is similar to any child’s discussions of getting out on her own and finding her place in the world. In 1863, a more likely life path for a girl of 17 would be to marry and start her own family. Anna was unlikely to find a suitable husband in rural Nova Scotia. Renaud is successful in having Anna reveal the satisfaction of her new position and the sadness of missing family, the dangers faced in the fires that destroyed the museum, and the pain of still feeling out of place, even with others as unusual as she. The calm dignity and happiness of building her own home with Martin, her husband, a home made especially so that everyone fit is moving. All of this is well portrayed in Renaud’s text.

The story is enhanced by illustrations by Marie Lafrance. The somewhat limited palette is consistent throughout the book and yet is dynamic enough to convey the pastoral settings of Anna’s childhood and the cityscape of New York, including the dramatic fire. The style is crisp yet soft, somewhat reminiscent of Charles Wysocki’s, though Lafrance uses two-point perspective. The small details of the illustrations enhance readers’ understanding of Anna’s feelings. Though the text reveals no emotion, the illustration showing Anna on display at the county fair with one hand clasped around the other wrist expresses how she must have felt to be on display.

The True Tale of a Giantess is a warm and pleasant book which should appeal to the target audience as a read aloud. Without guidance, it could easily disappear on a nonfiction shelf.