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Black Swan Green: A Novel
by David Mitchell

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<a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/14316.Black_Swan_Green_A_Novel?utm_medium=api&amp;utm_source=blog_review" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img alt="Black Swan Green: A Novel" border="0" src="http://s3.amazonaws.com/photo.goodreads.com/books/1166586589m/14316.jpg" /></a> <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/14316.Black_Swan_Green_A_Novel?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">Black Swan Green: A Novel</a> by <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4565.David_Mitchell">David Mitchell</a> 
 <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/19095798?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review"><h3>My review</h3></a>
 rating: 5 of 5 stars It seems like it would just make a simple, pleasant read. A boy's coming of age story. Of course they compare it to Catcher in the Rye - don't they compare every boy's coming of age story to Catcher in the Rye? Don't let your eyes glaze over. David Mitchell has written a complex, multi-layered story - and yes, it's also about a 13-year-old boy growing up in Britain in 1982, right in the middle of the Falklands War. Mitchell's writing is sharp and saturated with details and seductive literary references. Each tension-filled scene is loaded with meaning on so many levels, making this a very satisfying read. The themes connect under the surface - adolescence, popularity, betrayal, divorce, war - bullies are, in fact, everywhere. We're surrounded.
 
 Jason Taylor is a little bit geeky and incredibly likable. He's a protagonist who earns your trust right from the start. You ache when he's pushed into the mud during gym class. You cringe when teachers ask him to read aloud, knowing his stutter will mark him as a leper to his classmates. You cheer him when he outsmarts the bullies. But Jason is surprisingly, refreshingly diplomatic about his fate. Most of the time, he devises ways to get out of sticky situations. He learns how to make himself invisible: "Picked-on kids act invisible to reduce the chances of being noticed and picked on. Stammerers act invisible to reduce the chances of being made to say something we can't. Kids whose parents argue act invisible in case we trigger another skirmish. The Triple Invisible Boy, that's Jason Taylor."
 
 Jason is a poet, and nobody knows it: he writes under the pseudonym Eliot Bolivar.( "If you show someone something you've written," he writes, "you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin, and say, 'When you're ready.'") But this book is also 'written' by Jason - and what a voice he has! More than story and character, more than meta-textual references and layers of interpretation, Black Swan Green must be read for the pure pleasure of language. Mitchell is a marvel of words, sensory details so rich they inspire a physiological response as you read. A sampling (and keep in mind that these are the observations of a 13-year-old boy):
 
 "Beef gristle tastes like deep-sea phlegm."
 "A sick bus growled past and made the air taste of pencils."
 "The eggy daffodils on the wallpaper'd fossilized to slag-heap grey as the light faded."
 "Lyme Regis was a casserole of tourists. Everywhere smelt of suntan oil, hamburgers, and burnt sugar."
 
 This is what makes me love reading. This is what drives me from page to page, chapter to chapter. Anyone can write down an anecdote. Good writers use the tools of the craft to create believable characters and a detailed fictional world. But it's only the brilliant writers, like David Mitchell, who can turn a descriptive phrase into a transcendent experience - make you reexamine your own world through another consciousness, and surprise you by making you feel this world as you read it.
 <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/332176?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">View all my reviews.</a>

Sarah's review
rating:

It seems like it would just make a simple, pleasant read. A boy's coming of age story. Of course they compare it to Catcher in the Rye - don't they compare every boy's coming of age story to Catcher in the Rye? Don't let your eyes glaze over. David Mitchell has written a complex, multi-layered story - and yes, it's also about a 13-year-old boy growing up in Britain in 1982, right in the middle of the Falklands War. Mitchell's writing is sharp and saturated with details and seductive literary references. Each tension-filled scene is loaded with meaning on so many levels, making this a very satisfying read. The themes connect under the surface - adolescence, popularity, betrayal, divorce, war - bullies are, in fact, everywhere. We're surrounded.

Jason Taylor is a little bit geeky and incredibly likable. He's a protagonist who earns your trust right from the start. You ache when he's pushed into the mud during gym class. You cringe when teachers ask him to read aloud, knowing his stutt...more It seems like it would just make a simple, pleasant read. A boy's coming of age story. Of course they compare it to Catcher in the Rye - don't they compare every boy's coming of age story to Catcher in the Rye? Don't let your eyes glaze over. David Mitchell has written a complex, multi-layered story - and yes, it's also about a 13-year-old boy growing up in Britain in 1982, right in the middle of the Falklands War. Mitchell's writing is sharp and saturated with details and seductive literary references. Each tension-filled scene is loaded with meaning on so many levels, making this a very satisfying read. The themes connect under the surface - adolescence, popularity, betrayal, divorce, war - bullies are, in fact, everywhere. We're surrounded.

Jason Taylor is a little bit geeky and incredibly likable. He's a protagonist who earns your trust right from the start. You ache when he's pushed into the mud during gym class. You cringe when teachers ask him to read aloud, knowing his stutter will mark him as a leper to his classmates. You cheer him when he outsmarts the bullies. But Jason is surprisingly, refreshingly diplomatic about his fate. Most of the time, he devises ways to get out of sticky situations. He learns how to make himself invisible: "Picked-on kids act invisible to reduce the chances of being noticed and picked on. Stammerers act invisible to reduce the chances of being made to say something we can't. Kids whose parents argue act invisible in case we trigger another skirmish. The Triple Invisible Boy, that's Jason Taylor."

Jason is a poet, and nobody knows it: he writes under the pseudonym Eliot Bolivar.( "If you show someone something you've written," he writes, "you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin, and say, 'When you're ready.'") But this book is also 'written' by Jason - and what a voice he has! More than story and character, more than meta-textual references and layers of interpretation, Black Swan Green must be read for the pure pleasure of language. Mitchell is a marvel of words, sensory details so rich they inspire a physiological response as you read. A sampling (and keep in mind that these are the observations of a 13-year-old boy):

"Beef gristle tastes like deep-sea phlegm."
"A sick bus growled past and made the air taste of pencils."
"The eggy daffodils on the wallpaper'd fossilized to slag-heap grey as the light faded."
"Lyme Regis was a casserole of tourists. Everywhere smelt of suntan oil, hamburgers, and burnt sugar."

This is what makes me love reading. This is what drives me from page to page, chapter to chapter. Anyone can write down an anecdote. Good writers use the tools of the craft to create believable characters and a detailed fictional world. But it's only the brilliant writers, like David Mitchell, who can turn a descriptive phrase into a transcendent experience - make you reexamine your own world through another consciousness, and surprise you by making you feel this world as you read it....less

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message 1: by manatee

07/09/2008 04:53PM

I cannot express how wonderful it was to step into Jason Taylor's world. I was about Jason's age in the 1980's and all the pop culture references are just right.