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Outstanding
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Booklist John Green
It is Mitchell's brilliant ability to reproduce internal monologue that makes this story so mesmerizing. [15 Feb 2006, p.45]
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Outstanding
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Kirkus Reviews
Great Britain's "Catcher in the Rye"--and another triumph for one of the present age's most interesting and accomplished novelists. [1 Feb 2006, p.105]
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Outstanding
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Library Journal
Here the virtuoso ventriloquism of multiple voices and settings focuses only on Jason and his surroundings but to heightened comic and dramatic effect. [1 Feb 2006, p.73]
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Outstanding
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Publishers Weekly
What he finds along the way captures the sheer pleasure of being a boy and brings to mind adventures shared by Huck and Tom. [2 Jan 2006, p.33]
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Outstanding
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Entertainment Weekly Jennifer Reese
This book is so entertainingly strange, so packed with activity, adventures, and diverting banter, that you only realize as the extraordinary novel concludes that the timid boy has grown before your eyes into a capable young man.
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Outstanding
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LA Weekly Claire Messud
For those who haven’t yet read Mitchell’s work, this funny, poignant story of a tumultuous year at a difficult age is simply a pleasure in itself...You’ve read it before, and then again, you haven’t read it quite like this. Jason Taylor is a classic, stammer and all.
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Outstanding
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San Francisco Chronicle David Hellman
Thoughtful and captivating... This book is something special. Possibly the best way to describe the success of Black Swan Green is to say that it skillfully combines the mythic with the realistic.
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Outstanding
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Washington Post Ron Charles
[Mitchell] has a perfect ear for that most calamitous year, the first of the teens, when we come face-to-face with the volatile nature of life. There's plenty of sadness in that discovery, of course, but humor, too, and he spins them together subtly in this touching novel.
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Outstanding
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The New York Times Book Review Nell Freudenberger
There has got to be a way to write fiction that pays attention to people at the same time that it represents the breadth and complexity of the kinds of societies we live in now. Mitchell is the rare novelist who makes me see that path clearly: it starts among suburban houses, passes through a meadow where boys are fighting, and somewhere up ahead leads into a shrinking wood, populated by ghosts on skates, lunatic beekeepers and Gypsies crouched around a dying fire.
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Outstanding
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Christian Science Monitor Yvonne Zipp
Mitchell, a Man Booker Prize nominee, clearly hasn't forgotten a minute of the humiliation and turmoil of adolescence, and he uses it all to create a genuinely memorable hero.
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Outstanding
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Los Angeles Times Kai Maristed
Mitchell writes dialogue to die for.
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Outstanding
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Boston Globe David Mitchell
What first appear to be episodic scenes from a life soon accumulate weight and meaning to form a profound, satisfying whole. Led by one of the most endearing, smart, and funny young narrators ever to rise up from the pages of a novel, we move from Jason's idiosyncratic, exclusive viewpoint to universal truths.
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Favorable
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Daily Telegraph Ali Smith
Its breathless confidence of voice and the cliffhangers of each chapter let it read like a book written for children. But this is another skilful ventriloquism, since Black Swan Green is written, as it were, by a child.
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Favorable
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New York Observer Adam Begley
Black Swan Green stands on three legs: a time, a place and a voice. The first two are rock solid; the third wobbles.
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Favorable
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The New Yorker Daniel Zalewski
By settling into a single narrative voice, and skipping the pyrotechnics, Mitchell has come by something that eluded him before: a sense of earned emotion.
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Favorable
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Salon Laura Miller
It's in Mitchell's sketches of adult cowardice, superficiality and mendacity, though, that Black Swan Green really blazes.
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Favorable
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Chicago Tribune Art Winslow
Mitchell has an excellent feel for the emotional contours of life at this age and is well aware of his literary antecedents.
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Mixed
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The Guardian Steven Poole
Black Swan Green's virtuosities of style complicate and enrich a series of vignettes whose bare story is, in the end, unremarkable.
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Mixed
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The Independent Scarlett Thomas
Taylor avoids the most obvious clichés, but still consumes Findus Crispy Pancakes, rhubarb and custard sweets and Irn Bru, while name-checking almost every early-Eighties brand and icon you can think of, including Etch A Sketch, Rubik's Cubes, Cliff Richard, Madness, Casio watches, Doc Martens and the game Operation.
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Mixed
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The Observer Adam Phillips
Mitchell's fans should see this as a transitional novel in what is already an intriguing career. Hopefully, in his next book, he will be more willing to get the reader into some kind of trouble.
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Unfavorable
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The Spectator Sebastian Smee
Reading Black Swan Green, I was bored, on the one hand, to be spending so much time (credibly) inside its narrator’s head and irritated, on the other, by episodes of such embarrassing artifice that I found myself skimming ahead in search of the words, ‘He woke with a start.
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Unfavorable
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The Economist
Competent, and sometimes entertaining. But it is also ordinary, and no amount of able transcription of the local vernacular reprieves the novel's stock discoveries about sex or yearning speculations about the future from sounding all too painfully familiar.
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