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Loading... Black Swan Green (2006)by David Mitchell
  
No current Talk conversations about this book.  kitzyl | Jul 22, 2016 |  A re-read, after reading Bone Clocks last year, I wanted to revisit and see what threads I missed. This is still a lovingly detailed tale showing the trails of growing up in a small community. I had remembered Hugo being in the book more, but no. The book is charming and still realistic, difficult to pull off, and it never falls into sentimentality. (  ) jkdavies | Jun 14, 2016 | Black Swan Green – David Mitchel Audio version performed by Kirby Heybourne 4 stars Thirteen-year-old Jason Taylor remembers Black Swan Green. He remembers village life, Upton-on-Seven Comprehensive School, the frozen pond, the Goose Fair and the Falklands War. Jason Taylor remembers 1982. This is a great coming of age story told in the voice of a perceptive, intelligent boy who suffers the growing pangs of being different from the pack. Portions of this book made me uncomfortable. Jason is painfully self-conscious of his stammer. His parents argue. He is severely bullied. I felt his pain so acutely that I wanted to put the book down. But I couldn’t walk away. I liked Jason Taylor too much. He is typical in his imaginative, exaggerated fantasies, but atypical in his acute observations and pithy commentary. Sticking with the story paid off. Jason perseveres through the tough times and triumphs through at least one year of adolescence. Bullying is a hot topic in today’s schools. Jason Taylor and Black Swan Green could make a great contribution to any discussion of this problem. When Jason Taylor has finally reached his limit and takes decisive action, there are immediate consequences for his class. From my point of view, Mr. Kempsey exemplifies how an educator should not respond to bullying. On the other hand, Miss Lippits’ lesson on secrets and reputation is ‘spot on’. (“Miss Lippets loves her job on good days.”) ( ) msjudy | May 30, 2016 | I listened to the audiobook through OneDigital, an iPhone app with a partnership with the library. The app itself was a little buggy -- it would forget where I had left off frequently, so frequently that I began saving bookmarks every single time I knew I was about to stop listening so that I could find my place again; it also needed me to sign in every few launches, so it wasn't the smoothest of listening experiences. But the book was fantastic. I enjoyed the personification of Jason's stammer as Hangman and the travails of being a teenage boy with an older sister in the 80s. I thought he captured that awkward straddling of full teenage-hood and the childhood being left behind, in Jason's case a little more quickly as his parent's relationship deteriorates and he deals with the Black Swan Green bullies. As usual, with a David Mitchell book, there are threads in the story that rear their heads and then disappear beneath the surface of the story that hint at a larger, more complex version of reality than meets the eye, but unlike Bone Clocks or Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet they are left buried like the apocryphal children who have fallen through the ice into the pond. Having heard David Mitchell speak about his own troubles overcoming a stammer on his Bone Clocks tour, I can imagine this is an intensely personal novel for him and while it never reaches the incandescent heights of some of his other books, I really enjoyed spending a year with Jason Taylor. ( ) mhanlon | May 12, 2016 | An English youth shares the trials and tribulations of growing up. Just wonderful. I must say, I listened to the audiobook, and the reader totally captivated me. I plan to get the book and read it. (  ) seschanfield | Mar 7, 2016 |
Fleshing out such elementary wisdom is what coming-of-age novels are about. No doubt, that label will make some grimace and others wax nostalgic, but this novel is OK with caressing its traditional parameters. It settles for the sparks of verisimilitude instead of the fireworks of reinvention, while transmitting the uncomfortably comfortable sensation of smacking into the participants in one’s young life.  Mitchell is so good at inhabiting other voices that halfway through his ambitious "Cloud Atlas" (2004) — the characters include a 19th-century traveler in the Chatham Islands and a genetically engineered slave in a futuristic Korean dystopia — I began to suspect that Mitchell himself might actually be a noncorpum, a spirit who has commandeered the body of a young Englishman to type out its books. Anxious, perhaps, about being mistaken for a supernatural being, Mitchell set himself a different sort of challenge in his brilliant new novel, "Black Swan Green." The book, set almost exclusively in a village of that name in quiet, provincial Worcestershire, follows 13-year-old Jason Taylor through 13 months, each folded into a storylike chapter. . . . In Jason, Mitchell creates an evocative yet authentically adolescent voice, an achievement even more impressive than the ventriloquism of his earlier books.
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The main highlights, due to the order I've read this author, are the recurring characters of Hugh - so great to see more of his brilliant compulsory lying and bullying, there really needs to be an entire novel on him -, and Eva whose presence feels more like a fantasy on Jason's account, as a nurturing figure for his poetic upbringing. The clarification of the difference between stuttering and stammering appealed to me as I like learning tidbits in books. This is one of the better kid-voice novels, which be a standalone read but can be appreciated more by Mitchell fans for the completeness of his oeuvre. (