black swan green

Being a 13-year-old boy, isn't the greatest thing to be, but it isn't the worse either. I've had this book on my reading list for a while because Dave Mitchell wrote it, and I've liked everything that I've read written by him this far. I couldn't help thinking that this novel had to have some autobiographical information. I mean, how is it possible for a guy to write about the day-to-day of a 13-year-old boy in the first person without including some of his own inner dialog from that stage of his life. The book takes place mainly in 1982, and I bet Mitchell was about that age in '82.

I wondered if some of the fantastical that has appeared in many of Mitchell's other books would show up here, but after a while it became clear that this was a story about a boy.* Jason Taylor's life in a small town in the English countryside seems boring an uneventful to him, and most of his peers, but that is only the story on the surface. Mitchell takes us into the inner dialogs, hopes, and fears of a teen boy, and while we all know that the world will eventually become wider for him, what he knows now is the world he lives in, and Mitchell helps us to reconnect with those feelings we all had as kids.

Black Swan Green is sweet, tragic, exciting, violent and in some cases heartbreaking, but all from the point of view of Jason. Is this the best of David Mitchell's books? No. But was it entertaining, fun, and in in some places really funny? Yes. Teens can say anything, and they often do. Mitchell takes advantage of the recklessness of his teen characters to say things adults may filter out, and even when he doesn't say it out loud, Jason's inner dialog often fills in the blanks.

 

* The fantastic is not completely absent, but in the context of this book, it could be seen as the imaginings of an adolescence boy. Trust the internet and the nerds who live there to inform me that, like a lot of Mitchell's books, characters sometimes appear in the periphery of other books. That is apparently the case here as well, but I missed.