BLACK SWAN GREEN by David Mitchell

Jason Taylor is the smart, funny, and especially endearing first-person narrator of this gem, which takes place in a small English town in the 1980s.  Jason has a stammer, which is different from a stutter, according to Jason, and it plagues his thirteen-year-old life almost as much as the bullies at school.  And if these problems weren’t torture enough, his parents’ marriage is on the rocks, and his sister is leaving for college.  (The prospect of a broken home is never really funny, but Jason’s mom hilariously punishes his father for his infidelity with an expensive project that backfires.)  Jason’s numerous adventures fill the pages of this novel, the most telling of which, I think, is when he finds the lost wallet of his primary nemesis.  Another good one is his race through a backyard gauntlet which he has to negotiate in order to join a vaunted school gang, and this obstacle course seems to be a metaphor for the many pitfalls of adolescence which he has to weave his way through on a daily basis.  Jason strives for acceptance into a peer group that is obviously not worthy of him, but, along the way, he learns some valuable life lessons about love, death, bigotry, and honesty—to name a few.  We also discover late in the novel that the burden of guilt weighs him down, even though he really bears no responsibility for the tragedy in question.  In other words, he holds himself to too high a standard at times, and he’s a sensitive kid, writing poetry under a pseudonym in order to avoid ridicule.  My only complaint, and it’s a minor one, is that Jason’s narration is full of contractions, even double contractions, such as “shouldn’t’ve,” that are difficult to read.  I think the author intends for these contractions to lend authenticity to Jason’s voice, but that authenticity would be easier to listen to than to read, and I think Jason would be just as authentic on the page without this distraction.