Black Swan Green: 11/05/07

Black Swan Green takes place over the course of a year: from January 1982 to January 1983. There is one chapter for each month. Until the last chapter, the other twelve chapters read more like short stories than chapters in a novel. The plotting is subtle, often focusing on the mundane joys of life than on the big picture events.

The narrator of the book is thirteen-year-old Jason Taylor. He is like Adrian Mole but more likeable and probably smarter. His narration is told in the past tense, somewhere between the impressions he would have had as a teen and the twenty-twenty hindsight of an adult. These months are told in standard prose, not in the pseudo diary entries that many of these teen coming of age books have.

Black Swan Green needed to be read at a leisurely pace. Every book has its own rhythm. For this book I found myself needing to savor each chapter and take a break between chapters. When I can normally read a book in a day to a day and a half, I ended up taking almost five days to read this novel.

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