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Black Swan Green
A Novel
by David Mitchell


7.9

based on 22 reviews
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based on 14 votes
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Cloud Atlas

Official Publisher Site

The acclaimed author of "Cloud Atlas" returns with a coming-of-age story centering on a 13-year-old boy in early 1980s England.

Random House, 304 pages
04/11/2006
$23.95

ISBN: 1400063795

Fiction
General Literature & Fiction

All reviews are classified as one of five grades: Outstanding (4 points), Favorable (3), Mixed (2), Unfavorable (1) and Terrible (0). To calculate the Metascore, we divide total points achieved by the total points possible (i.e., 4 x the number of reviews), with the resulting percentage (multiplied by 100) being the Metascore. Learn more...

Booklist John Green

It is Mitchell's brilliant ability to reproduce internal monologue that makes this story so mesmerizing. [15 Feb 2006, p.45]

Kirkus Reviews

Great Britain's "Catcher in the Rye"--and another triumph for one of the present age's most interesting and accomplished novelists. [1 Feb 2006, p.105]

Library Journal

Here the virtuoso ventriloquism of multiple voices and settings focuses only on Jason and his surroundings but to heightened comic and dramatic effect. [1 Feb 2006, p.73]

Publishers Weekly

What he finds along the way captures the sheer pleasure of being a boy and brings to mind adventures shared by Huck and Tom. [2 Jan 2006, p.33]

Entertainment Weekly Jennifer Reese

This book is so entertainingly strange, so packed with activity, adventures, and diverting banter, that you only realize as the extraordinary novel concludes that the timid boy has grown before your eyes into a capable young man.

LA Weekly Claire Messud

For those who haven’t yet read Mitchell’s work, this funny, poignant story of a tumultuous year at a difficult age is simply a pleasure in itself...You’ve read it before, and then again, you haven’t read it quite like this. Jason Taylor is a classic, stammer and all.

San Francisco Chronicle David Hellman

Thoughtful and captivating... This book is something special. Possibly the best way to describe the success of Black Swan Green is to say that it skillfully combines the mythic with the realistic.

Washington Post Ron Charles

[Mitchell] has a perfect ear for that most calamitous year, the first of the teens, when we come face-to-face with the volatile nature of life. There's plenty of sadness in that discovery, of course, but humor, too, and he spins them together subtly in this touching novel.

The New York Times Book Review Nell Freudenberger

There has got to be a way to write fiction that pays attention to people at the same time that it represents the breadth and complexity of the kinds of societies we live in now. Mitchell is the rare novelist who makes me see that path clearly: it starts among suburban houses, passes through a meadow where boys are fighting, and somewhere up ahead leads into a shrinking wood, populated by ghosts on skates, lunatic beekeepers and Gypsies crouched around a dying fire.

Christian Science Monitor Yvonne Zipp

Mitchell, a Man Booker Prize nominee, clearly hasn't forgotten a minute of the humiliation and turmoil of adolescence, and he uses it all to create a genuinely memorable hero.

Los Angeles Times Kai Maristed

Mitchell writes dialogue to die for.

Boston Globe David Mitchell

What first appear to be episodic scenes from a life soon accumulate weight and meaning to form a profound, satisfying whole. Led by one of the most endearing, smart, and funny young narrators ever to rise up from the pages of a novel, we move from Jason's idiosyncratic, exclusive viewpoint to universal truths.

Daily Telegraph Ali Smith

Its breathless confidence of voice and the cliffhangers of each chapter let it read like a book written for children. But this is another skilful ventriloquism, since Black Swan Green is written, as it were, by a child.

New York Observer Adam Begley

Black Swan Green stands on three legs: a time, a place and a voice. The first two are rock solid; the third wobbles.

The New Yorker Daniel Zalewski

By settling into a single narrative voice, and skipping the pyrotechnics, Mitchell has come by something that eluded him before: a sense of earned emotion.

Salon Laura Miller

It's in Mitchell's sketches of adult cowardice, superficiality and mendacity, though, that Black Swan Green really blazes.

Chicago Tribune Art Winslow

Mitchell has an excellent feel for the emotional contours of life at this age and is well aware of his literary antecedents.

The Guardian Steven Poole

Black Swan Green's virtuosities of style complicate and enrich a series of vignettes whose bare story is, in the end, unremarkable.

The Independent Scarlett Thomas

Taylor avoids the most obvious clichés, but still consumes Findus Crispy Pancakes, rhubarb and custard sweets and Irn Bru, while name-checking almost every early-Eighties brand and icon you can think of, including Etch A Sketch, Rubik's Cubes, Cliff Richard, Madness, Casio watches, Doc Martens and the game Operation.

The Observer Adam Phillips

Mitchell's fans should see this as a transitional novel in what is already an intriguing career. Hopefully, in his next book, he will be more willing to get the reader into some kind of trouble.

The Spectator Sebastian Smee

Reading Black Swan Green, I was bored, on the one hand, to be spending so much time (credibly) inside its narrator’s head and irritated, on the other, by episodes of such embarrassing artifice that I found myself skimming ahead in search of the words, ‘He woke with a start.

The Economist

Competent, and sometimes entertaining. But it is also ordinary, and no amount of able transcription of the local vernacular reprieves the novel's stock discoveries about sex or yearning speculations about the future from sounding all too painfully familiar.

The average user rating for this book is 7.9 (out of 10) based on 14 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Ron gave it a7:
As Cloud Atlas showed, Mitchelll is a technical, formal wizard. But he needs a meaningful and emotionally-felt narrative--not, as here and there, a series of "events"--too often tiresome and with what can only be seen as (by and large) mundane insights, even for a 12-13 year old. FInally, the recent plethora of first person narratives by adolescents is a trend that should now be honored more in the breach than in the observance. A bit more heart and bit less head.

Sean W gave it a4:
Stylistically the novel is sound. It makes clever use of vernacular and metaphor. But this coming of age tale is so over-famailiar and lacking in substance that it looks to me like a slump after the outstanding "Cloud Atlas."

Sue J gave it a9:
Loved it!

rob gave it a9:
highly compelling read.

larry G gave it a1:
Some readers will undoubtedly get a "low-voltage charge" out of what Matt DC describes as the entertaining sadness of Mitchell's take on a difficult year of adolescence. I didn't. It's obvious that Jason is a stand-in for Mitchell's own Tom Brokaw-like speech impediment-afflicted childhood, however, does that, plus a bunch of '80s pop tunes, make this a compelling novel? No, not at all. In fact, it's a story that would do Michael Barone's Reader's Digest proud. I was annoyed by the precious "through-the-mouths-of-babes" adult humor.

Matt DC gave it an8:
Black Swan green is nowhere near as complex in structure or style as Cloud Atlas, but that's not a bad thing. Mitchell's take on a difficult year of adolescence is highly entertaining and often sad. And beneath the everyday narrative there's just a hint of strangeness that adds a low-voltage current of magic to the book. Mitchell also adds a chapter which is a highly-satisfying reward to readers of Cloud Atlas. The conclusion is less cut-and-dried than Michael K would suggest. Well worth a read.

Tom M gave it a10:
'Black Swan Green' is hilarious, insightful, beautiful, ingenius, etc. This not a coming-of-age novel. Once this is understood, the reader will be consistenbtly and thoroughly rewarded.

Black Swan Green A Novel by David Mitchell

Black Swan Green
A Novel
by David Mitchell