Name: Black Swan Green
ISBN: 9780340822807

David Mitchell

The dazzling novel from critically-acclaimed David Mitchell. Shortlisted for the 2006 Costa Novel Award Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2006 January, 1982. Thirteen-year-old Jason Taylor - covert stammerer and reluctant poet - anticipates a stultifying year in his backwater English village. But he hasn't reckoned with bullies, simmering family discord, the Falklands War, a threatened gypsy invasion and those mysterious entities known as girls. Charting thirteen months in the black hole between childhood and adolescence, this is a captivating novel, wry, painful and vibrant with the stuff of life.

Black Swan Green

Kat Albanese

The earth’s a door, if you press your ear against it.

The world’s a headmaster who works on your faults.

Probably is a word with an emergency ejector seat.

People say your ears burn when people are talking about you, but I get a hum in the cellar of my stomach… Writing buries this hum.

“Like I always say, ‘A stranger is just a friend you haven’t met yet.’”

Bollucks. I’ve never met the Yorkshire Ripper, but he wouldn’t be a friend.

If you show someone something you’ve written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin and say, “When you’re ready.”

Dancing’s a brain that dancers are only cells of. Dancers think they’re in charge, but they’re obeying ancient orders.

A meditative novel of a young boy on the cusp of adulthood follows a single year in the life of thirteen-year-old Jason Taylor as he grows up in what is for him the sleepiest village in Worcestershire, England, in 1982. By the aauthor of Cloud Atlas. Reprint. 75,000 first printing.

Sarah Sammis

Black Swan Green takes place over the course of a year: from January 1982 to January 1983. There is one chapter for each month. Until the last chapter, the other twelve chapters read more like short stories than chapters in a novel. The plotting is subtle, often focusing on the mundane joys of life than on the big picture events.

The narrator of the book is thirteen-year-old Jason Taylor. He is like Adrian Mole but more likeable and probably smarter. His narration is told in the past tense, somewhere between the impressions he would have had as a teen and the twenty-twenty hindsight of an adult. These months are told in standard prose, not in the pseudo diary entries that many of these teen coming of age books have.

Black Swan Green needed to be read at a leisurely pace. Every book has its own rhythm. For this book I found myself needing to savor each chapter and take a break between chapters. When I can normally read a book in a day to a day and a half, I ended up taking almost five days to read this novel.

Aubrey Hicks

A masterpiece - I don't have the quote perfect word, this is as close as I can get. The young narrator is wise beyond his years, in that naive way I hope we all were once upon a time. He's bullied but not broken, scared and self-conscious, funny and alive. The sense of place is just perfect. The cruelty of children, the ambitions and dreams of the adults - the weight of decisions. This is a marvel, a lovely tale which I couldn't put down. And now that I've read a few of David Mitchell's works - this is my favorite so far. 

I liked CLOUD ATLAS and NUMBER NINE DREAM and GHOSTWRITTEN ... I loved BLACK SWAN GREEN. Loved this.

completely delightful. i now know i must read all of david mitchell’s work.

a cozy coming-of-age year in the life of a 13 year old boy in a quiet 1982 english village and a unique take on speech impediments at a cruel age. 

completely delightful. i now know i must read all of david mitchell’s work.

a cozy coming-of-age year in the life of a 13 year old boy in a quiet 1982 english village and a unique take on speech impediments at a cruel age. 

really beautiful writing 💙

Frederik De Bosschere

Reading Black Swan Green completes my David Mitchell adventure (for now). Although much more limited in creative scope as some of his other works (e.g. Ghostwritten, Cloud Atlas or Bone Clocks), Mitchell still proves himself to be a master storyteller. This is a beautiful coming of age novel, where we are teleported back into the mind of a 13-year-old, as the protagonist deals with love, family, school and society. The good, the bad and the ugly. Through Jason Taylor, David Mitchell made me relive my youth.

Riah Forbes 

LOVED this book. I almost want to start re-reading right away because I'm seriously going to miss Jason's voice if I don't. Thanks for the amazing recommendation, Emily!

Fraser Simons

We follow Jason Taylor aka Eliot Bolivar. A schism of boyhood identity in every respect, our 13-year-old protagonist chronicles about a year in a small town called Black Swan Green. 

He has one sort of friend, a kid lower on the pecking order of smol patriarchy, and a not insignificant speech impediment that often ostracizes him. His parents are having problems, his big sister, with whom he has a tumultuous relationship that mostly leans to allyship, and he’s also nested a secret in his bone clock of a body: He’s actually also a published poet. 

Sure, it’s just local and a talent that needs to be honed, but it’s also the perfect manifestation of Taylor’s coming-of-age tale.

Jason has a few alter egos: said poet, a name for the toxic and dark thoughts we all have from time to time, Maggot, and we also have the hangman, who represents a kind of psychological embodiment of Jayson’s stutter. When he tries to navigate a sentence and it becomes ‘mashed down’, a word perceived as not allowed by this figure, it is as though the hangman takes over Jayson’s body. 

All communication, then, because a fight for agency. Then, because, kids are such shits, the bullying follows when these incidents are public. 

There are multiple arcs and themes inbuilt here. Most of them are pretty mundane but handled quite well. Jayson piques from these seemingly small tribulations, which, I’m sure, at the time as we can all remember, feel as though they are the largest obstacles of all life—but which he does discern the inner workings of the world, and lays them out brilliantly. Here we see the flourishes of Eliot Bolivar, I think. The person Jayson may grow into, if nurtured. 

 But Jayson’s problems often come from the aforementioned identities he’s combating and exploring. Again, some problems seem trivial. But we know in the Mitchell verse such small things that shape the morality and character of an individual are almost quantifiable. What is right and not right reoccur over and over but the side of good absolutely needs all those it can muster. 

What’s more is we meet Hugo Lamb from Mitchell’s later book The Bone Clocks. Even that short chapter with Lamb is the foreshadowing for his beginnings. All of the essential ingredients of his problems in the future and his ethics are right there, in their own way, warring with Jayson. Lamb representing amoralism and the cult of cool, Jayson, unbeknownst to anyone, the “loser” colliding with moments that could easily shape him and send him Lambs way. 

For those that read Cloud Atlas there is also a lovely coda to Frobisher’s storyline. The composer with which he boards has a daughter, if you recall, and she appears herein as well. I relished that very much, as Frobisher is my favourite character from the book.

So, yes, it’s a satisfying, if quite different read. It’s not sprawling or meta or from multiple perspectives. But, as usual, the perspective is, in my opinion, extremely well crafted. A distinct and excellent voice, filled with some opaque Britishisms. The voice of a young boy, a child, sometimes, a poet and one day a man, is all there. It doesn’t overstay it’s welcome and it does exactly what it sets out to do in a quiet and understated, effective way.

Trevor Berrett

Mitchell's books are always unique. Even this one, seemingly a simple coming of age story, is astonishing in its insight and in its technique.
 This story is about a 13 year old boy in a small town in England. It begins in January and runs through the year to the next January. Each month is a chapter that, in a way, stands on its own, so you get thirteen vignettes. However, they are all tied together with some overarching themes.
 Interestingly, each chapter is about something important in the life of a child: popularity, friends, bullying, music, etc. However, Mitchell entwines these vignettes with the overarching themes of family, divorce, growing up. 
 The book is brilliant for several reasons. First, each story stands on its own and tells about some incredibly impactful even in the narrator's life. In the next story, that event is seemingly dropped. However, it has not dropped from the conscious of the narrator. Readers can tell that these events continue to affect the narrator, even though he is not necessarily acknowledging them. In this way, Mitchell plays with the theme of time, beginnings, and endings--themes he played with brilliantly in Cloud Atlas. 
 Another brilliant facet to this little book is the astounding voice of the narrator. It is pitch perfect thirteen year-old boy. However, at the same time it is poetic and contains wordplay worthy of Nabokov. Mitchell is a genius with voice (once again, as shown in Cloud Atlas) and this book shows how much control he has over language. This narrator is a boy who on the surface is more concerned about boy-things than about his parents' "slow motion divorce in four seasons." But we see him struggling to bring his feelings to the surface at the same time he is struggling to keep them contained and hidden. 
 Why didn't I give this book five stars? To me Mitchell's masterwork, so far, is Cloud Atlas. This book is brilliant, but it does not have the same scope or philosophical depth. That Mitchell can still integrate so much depth, however, makes me totter on giving it five stars.

Daryl Houston

I liked this one a lot. A fun voice, a neat sense of nostalgia, and bits here and there that invite rumination. It's not a hard book by any stretch of the imagination, or a formally tricky one (a la Cloud Atlas), but neither is it exactly light-weight. It's one I'd read again, possibly on a single tear with the other Mitchell I've read. Now I'm off to get his two earliest novels and will wait with bated breath for the next.

John I. Clark

** spoiler alert **
           I really liked this book, though it confusingly bounced around a lot. I loved that the dialog is in British local 'dialect'. Mitchell does a masterful job of delving into adolescent issues such as bullying, young love and dealing with parental division/divorce.

Gordon McLean

Dealing with various life changing events, including the impact of the Falklands War on a small rural community in England, I was so caught up with the book that I almost felt cheated when it was over.

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