Midway through reading Sag Harbor, I think I have decided that Black Swan Green was my favorite novel from the semester. It's not that I disliked other books (in fact Sag Harbor is shaping up to be a good book) but I think I just found the characters in the novel more relatable. I also really enjoyed Jason as both a narrator and a character. I feel like I could go off and list all the reasons why Black Swan Green was my favorite (like strong female characters or a compelling voice) or why I think BSG is a good replacement of the novel Catcher in the Rye (which is pretty much covered in one of Mr. Mitchell's blog posts) but instead I think I'll focus on some things I wish I could change about BSG.
While this is a coming of age story, at the end of the novel I felt like Jason still had a lot of growing up to do. Yes, I know, he is only 13, but for some reason I think I kind of expected a more mature attitude than "I don't care what they think." It just kind of felt like he was ignoring his problems and running away from them. And then the one time that he did stand up for himself, he does it in a way that kind of just copies the actions of his attackers; fighting fire with fire. While it did end up working for him, there must have been a better solution and a different path that I wish Jason could have taken.
The other thing I found kind of frustrating was that fact that pretty much every chapter, and the book in general, ends with a cliff hanger. Sure, in the end Jason was somewhat able to overcome his bullying, got a little bit of confidence after dealing with Neal, and he got the girl, but the whole thing seemed anti-climatic to me. I just don't like cliff hangers. I want to know what happens with Jason at his new school, in his new adventures. Does he keep the image of nobody like he had at the beginning of the novel or does he embrace his stuttering self or does he right away try to get in with the cool crowd? In essence, I just don't think I know who Jason actually wants to be. Maybe I was expecting this big epiphany moment (or maybe I just didn't catch the part where Jason expresses all these things) but really all I got was a very cliche ending (where Julia says something along the lines of life is full of ups and downs or something).
Anyway, overall, I still really enjoyed Black Swan Green. Which novel was your favorite?
I definitely agree with you about the cliffhanger thing. There's a cliffhanger at the end of every chapter, and the next chapter just starts like nothing happened. The decisions Jason makes at these cliffhangers could be very significant, and I feel like David Mitchell could really strengthen the themes of Black Swan Green by filling in some of what happened between the cliffhangers and the following chapters. I don't know which of these coming of age books was my favorite. I definitely enjoyed all of them, which is more than I can say for many of the books that I've had to read for school.
ReplyDeleteThe (relatively) open ending seems realistic to me: life goes on month to month, and there are always narrative lines left open as others close, and any "ending" to a story of a life in progress will involve some degree of unfinished narrative (as Julia says, wisely, because it's "not the end"). "Cliffhanger" to me suggests a deliberately suspenseful plot device--"Will our hero escape from the villain's clutches? Tune in next week . . ." Plenty of narrative threads are tied up at the end of _BSG_, but like life (and coming-of-age?) itself, it's not as if a definitive end can be stamped on the whole thing. I'd even say the *point* is that Jason still has all this living to do.
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