David Mitchell's Black Swan Green is the kind of book you just devour. It's a year in the life of Jason Taylor, a thirteen-year-old boy who lives in Black Swan Green (a small village in Worcestershire), who stammers, has a wicked imagination, writes poetry and suffers at the hand of adolescence. Told in a sweeping stream of consciousness narrative, the book totally brings you into the mind of a boy that age, and it's pitch perfect.
To an extent, the book reminded me a bit of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, but maybe only because both Mitchell and Haddon use similar narrative styles. Ripe with details about what it's like to be a kid, the book oozes adolescence, which brought me right back to grade eight and left me standing around George's (can't remember his last name) living room listening to Duran Duran and flirting over X-Men comics.
It's an impressive novel. Truly. Which, of course, means that now I'm going to have to read Cloud Atlas.
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1 comment:
I'm so jealous that you got to read it. Ghostwritten, Number9dream and Cloud Atlas are all fantastic, but I understand rather different in structure to Black Swan Green.
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