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Black Swan Green (Hardcover)

by David Mitchell (Author)

5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)

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Product Details

Hardcover: 304 pages
Publisher: Knopf Canada (April 11 2006)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0676974961
ISBN-13: 978-0676974966
Product Dimensions: 23.6 x 15.7 x 3.6 cm
Shipping Weight: 567 g

Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)

Amazon.ca Sales Rank: #113,192 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Product Description

From Publishers Weekly

Any "whingers" out there won't feel comfortable in Mitchell's new novel of burgeoning and cruel adolescent boys in the rural but hardly pastoral England village of Black Swan Green. Heyborne, who performed one of the characters in the audiobook of Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, embodies the voice of 13-year-old Jason Taylor to perfection. His timbre is youthful and a tad reluctant, as might be expected of a teenager with a stammer who wants desperately to fit in with his rowdy friends. Jason's friends sound too much like Jason himself, but since they are viewed from Jason's perspective and since boys in a clique do tend to sound alike, the choices Heyborne makes are not problematic. The 1980s Worcestershire slang is more challenging, however. The addition of the letter "y" to words to form adjectives is somewhat "educationy," but it is sometimes hard to work through regionalisms that one cannot see in order to place them better. Although Mitchell's novel doesn't lives up to Lord of the Flies, which it derives from, Heyborne's performance is both compelling and compassionate, and the audio is entertaining and highly rewarding.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.

From School Library Journal

Adult/High School–Thirteen chapters provide a monthly snapshot of Jason Taylor's life in small-town England from January 1982 to January 1983. Whether the 13-year-old narrator is battling his stammer or trying to navigate the social hierarchy of his schoolmates or watching the slow disintegration of his parents' marriage, he relates his story in a voice that is achingly true to life. Each chapter becomes a skillfully drawn creation that can stand on its own, but is subtly interwoven with the others. While readers may not see the connectedness in the first two thirds of the book, the final three sections skillfully bring the threads together. The author does not pull any punches when it comes to the casual cruelty that adolescent boys can inflict on one another, but it is this very brutality that underscores the sweetness of which they are also capable. With its British slang and complex twists and turns, this title is not a selection for reluctant readers, but teens who enjoy multifaceted coming-of-age stories will be richly rewarded. The chapter entitled Rocks, which centers around the British conflict in the Falkland Islands in May 1982, is especially compelling as Jason and his peers deal with the death of one of their own. Mitchell has been hailed as one of the great new authors of the 21st century; with Black Swan Green, he shows again how the best books challenge readers' complacency.–Kim Dare, Chantilly Regional Library, Fairfax County, VA
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

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5.0 out of 5 stars The World in a Worcestershire village, May 14 2009

By	ES (Ottawa, ON) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Black Swan Green (Paperback)

For his follow-up to the audacious Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell tries something on a smaller scale: a coming-of-age novel told entirely from a thirteen-year-old boy's viewpoint. (Smaller, and closer to home: the boy, Jason, is the same age Mitchell was at the time this book is set, in 1982, and lives in the same place, the Malvern Hills in dullest Worcestershire.) Black Swan Green is as simple in its chronology - thirteen chapters taking us from one January to the next, month by month - as Cloud Atlas was baroque, but in its own way is just as startling.

Jason is a stutterer and closet poet, and therefore marked for extinction by the school bullies. At home things are marginally better, with his parents' marriage falling apart, gradually but inevitably, like a car wreck viewed in extreme slow motion. Mitchell has a keen eye for the minutiae of schoolground and marital cruelties - the former as tribal warfare conducted by Munchkins, the latter death by a thousand paper cuts - and manages the neat trick of detailing them without descending into miserabilism.

This is, in fact, a funny and even joyous novel, because Jason is just young enough to still be capable of conflating reality and fantasy. If anticipating having to read out loud at school assembly is like awaiting execution, there's also high drama - and comedy - in exploring woods that you know are haunted, or setting out with a friend to discover a tunnel under the Malverns --

-- Or discovering that girls are attractive. Jason's first kiss marks the end of childhood enchantment. But long before that happens he's shown an unchildlike capacity for empathy - his decency is extremely attractive - as well as a precocious understanding of adult goings-on, thanks to two gifts. The first is a mature artistic sensibility: his terse and insightful descriptions would be the envy of most novelists (not to mention his Mitchellian penchant for adopting nouns as verbs). The second is a talent for blundering into, and observing at length, the whole gamut of adult experience.

Children are savages, after all. Jason's advanced sense and sensibility are the most fantastic elements of this story: the equivalent of the reincarnation motif in Cloud Atlas. They serve the same function, of allowing Black Swan Green to encompass a world of adult experience: sex, love and marriage, race prejudice (there are Gypsies in the woods), war and death (a local boy dies in the Falklands Adventure)...

And a kind of message emerges: that while human beings can be stupid and cruel, a civilized life is still a possibility (the decency, again - and apprehension of beauty - that even Mitchell's most fallen characters can display is touching). That, I suspect, is why you accept Jason's unbelievably precocious insights: because the world they reveal is so worth inhabiting.

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