Black Swan Green, by David Mitchell

Typically David Mitchell's novels tend to be post mordern epics spaning generations and continents, laced with relational themes and threads of interconected characters and experience.  These novels, like Cloud Atlas, Number9Dream, and Ghostwritten and surreal and captivating stories that read like a car wreck where everthing is twisted metal and burning cloth and the smell of gasoline promises an explosion.  But some of his work follows more traditional boundaries and tells a lineal story in a masterful and authentic voice.  But all of his work brings it main theme to bear on human fraility and flaw and how individuals rise to overcome insecurites and fear.

Black Swan Green is almost a collection of short stories that span a year in the lif of Jason Taylor, a 13 year old boy in a small village in Worchester, England.  Jason has a stutter, an older sister, and parents struggling through a rocky marriage.  From January to January Jason has to overcome insecurities surrounding his stutter, stand up to bullies at school, and deal with hard life experiences -- war, death, disability, bigotry, drunk and sometimes abusive fathers, first kiss, divorce, moving. 

But the story is, ultimatly, about Jason growing up and entering adolesence.  At the begining of the novel he is hindered by a mythology that explains the world around him and gives reasons for the way people are what/who they are.  But slowly his mythology is altered and dropped as layers of the people in the small farming village are stripped away and he has opporitunities to see beneath the surface and recognize that people act tough for a reason, act stupid for a reason, hide behind feined ignorance for a reason.

I think that Black Swan Green illustrates that life is not surface deep, people struggle for breath behind closed doors and often just keeping thier mouths above to the surface of the water is all they can do.  Mitchell's novel is rich, colorful, and deep and told with the complex voice of an honest boy in a crazy world.  It is well worth your time.