If you’ve never read anything by David Mitchell I highly recommend starting with Black Swan Green. Mitchell is a beautiful writer with elegant turns of phrase and vivid descriptions, even when covering a slice out of the life of a lonely-ish 13-year-old boy in the early 1980s in small town England.
Jason Taylor is the youngest child of a grocery store chain manager and a bored lonely housewife growing up in the town of Black Swan Green, a town that has no greens and no swans of which to speak. Through Jason we get to relive the horrors and triumphs of adolescence, from the awkwardness of talking to the opposite sex to having the perfect comeback to the school bully in front of EVERYONE. Through Mitchell’s writing, we come to know Jason as a sweet young man who is painfully shy due to a stammer, but wants desperately to just fit in and get Dawn Madden to notice him. Though he isn’t aware of it himself, he’s quite a brave little dude – he stands up for what’s right even though doing so costs him access to the most secret, exclusive and selective boys club in town. He never runs away from a bullying jerk unless he knows he’s outnumbered, and he (sometimes begrudgingly) sticks with people who stick with him, no matter their social status. He longs for his parents to figure things out and stop fighting, and for his sister to let him borrow her copy of Abbey Road and stop calling him “the Thing.” All around Jason is a fascinating young man and most anyone will enjoy this traipse through his thirteenth year. We’re all Jason Taylor at some point, unless you grew up perfect. If so then this perhaps will be educational for you…
This is also a more accessible novel from Mitchell – it’s a straightforward slice of life from a character’s point of view. Other novels of his aren’t quite so ‘normal’ in my experience, even if they’re equally (or more) beautifully written.