Black Swan Green by David Mitchell

I picked this one up because I thought it was written by David Mitchell the actor and when I got home and looked at it properly I realised it wasn't the same Davis Mitchell and I was a bit disappointed. However, that disappointment did not last very long as I only had to get a page or two in before I was totally absorbed in it.

Black Swan Green is a fictional village in Worcestershire and home to young Jason who is thirteen and living comfortably among a group of friends who all go to the same secondary school. The book is set in the early 1980s, which is close enough to the 1970s when I was at secondary school, for me to find everything very familiar.

Back then, no-one was very interested in the mental health of teenagers and bullying was largely accepted as a fact of life unless it tipped over into something really noticeable. Jason has a stammer which he is able to conceal most of the time by swapping out difficult words for something else, but if he falls out with any of the hard kids it makes him an easy target.

I don't know if it's the same at school now, but in the book (and as I remember it) there was a very clear hierarchy of all the kids in the class. There's the hard ones at the top of the tree who always sit at the back of the school bus and pick on other kids at random just because they can. Then there are the middle ranking kids who are largely tolerated by the harder ones but they still have to watch what they say, just in case. Lastly there are the slow kids that are always last to be picked in football and end up having to sit in the front of the bus and classroom. This system mostly applies to boys but girls pick a side by who they hang out with after school.

As well as the plot lines involving the school, Jason's homelife is bubbling away in the background and the whole era is captured so accurately by Mitchell, I felt I had been transported back in time as I read it. Jason is a great kid who is both average and special at the same time. There are times in the book where little elements of individuality shine through and although he can be a risk taker he has a good moral compass and the courage to hold on to it when times get tough (which they do).

Anyone who was at secondary school in the 1970s or 80s would love this book for the nostalgia as well as the writing but the story is strong enough to appeal to any age group.

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