Season Butler

Swan Island is a small fictional retirement island off the coast of New Hampshire. 'The Wrinklies' (as the teenage protagonist refers to them) fiercely guard the sanctity of their dream island home; those from the Bad Land (i.e. anywhere outside of the island) are only allowed onto the island one Friday in every month, when visits by relatives are tolerated and a resupply of recreational drugs is welcomed.

The narrator is a 17 year old teenager who finds herself unwillingly coming-of-age in this alien environment, where her presence is accepted with strict limitations by the friendlier residents and abjectly abhorred by others. Left there 'for a few weeks' by her ill-equipped parents, the novel opens with the narrator now living alone in her late grandmother's house which is perilously close to falling off the edge of the eroding cliff face.

This is a clever and unusual novel which plays with a reversal of the societal norms where it is usually the older generation who are left lonely and isolated. Tolerated but not fully accepted as part of the fabric of the island, this is a novel of loneliness and marginalisation, where the raw and remote natural beauty of the island idyll amplifies the narrator's feelings of desolation. Like any teenager she's conflicted between outwardly kicking back whilst inwardly desperately wanting to feel wanted and secure, and is terrified of leaving the island in case her parents are just about to come for her.

Cygnet was one of the three debut books of the year picked out by the Sunday Times at this year's Cheltenham Festival. It's not a perfect novel - the author's greenness showed through in places (particularly towards the start of the novel) with occasional overworked prose, and I couldn't necessarily connect the narrator's voice with naturally being that of teenager. However, overall this novel engaged me much more than I'd expected it to. Its plot was fresh and highly original, and as a result it kept me hooked as I had no idea where she was taking me as a reader.

To me, Season Butler is just cutting her teeth as an author, with bigger and better still to come. Although a new black voice in published fiction, she's no stranger to writing, having already carved out a career as a dramaturgist, creative writing teacher and academic. Her experience from academia was apparent - in this novel you could tell she didn't just want to tell a story but was also interested in exploring certain 'what if' scenarios and schools of thought. Her blurb states that she's interested in intersectional feminism and difference bias, and although Cygnet wasn't overtly covering those themes, her 'day job' of exploring ideas and concepts certainly added an unexpected depth to her writing.

4 stars - imperfect yet enthralling nonetheless.… (más)

CYGNET, Season Butler, is an intimate look at life and death and everything in between. Narrated by a young woman everyone calls the Kid, the book takes place on a small island inhabited solely by a group of seniors self-titled the Wrinklies. They have all decided to escape the lives they had and start a new ones with the time they have left on earth. Our narrator has been abandoned on the island, called the Swan, right at the moment she is maturing from mature girl to young lady; where she must embrace adulthood whether she wants to or not.
Butler does an excellent job of voicing a confused and uneasy young woman struggling to find her place in the world. The Kid has dry wit, astute observations and unique insights that she doesn't always know what to do with. Very gritty and unabashedly reflective at all times, there are moments Butler's narrator reminds us of how people can be so harsh when conducting self-analysis. There a seemingly haphazard style in the book of presenting current action, past events, and the narrator inner thoughts and feelings. Perhaps Butler was trying to emulate how a young woman's world constantly jumps around materially and emotionally, but it came of as a little too disjointed and hard to keep up with.
Moving and touching, CYGNET is an emotional rollercoaster with some razor-sharp wit and poignant observations. A pleasure to read.
Thank you to Harper Collins, Season Butler, and Netgalley for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review!… (más)

‘The Bad Place is where we all come from.’

An unnamed 17-year old girl (the Kid) is living on Swan Island, off the coast of New Hampshire. As the book progresses, we learn more about how she came to be there, having been taken into care by her Grandmother Lolly after she had been removed by social services from her parents’ house. Now Lolly is dead, and each day the Kid hopes and expects her parents to come and collect her. The island itself is the home of the ‘Wrinklies’, with the average age of the population being 78; this is a place where only the old are allowed, a place to escape from the Bad Place of the outside world and see your days out. But there is a darker side to the island; resentment and fear of the outsider is rampant, there is an underground drug-dealing scene, and all is not as it seems. And the island itself is being eroded by the sea, Nature taking big chunks out of the land around the house where the Kid has been living, until by the end of the book it teeters precariously, about to fall into the sea.

Season Butler is a really good writer, and some of her descriptions of seascapes and the island are brilliantly done. There is also a keen sense of the life of a damaged girl, on the brink of adulthood, and having to deal with traumatic memories and the perils of modern-day life. The Kid is seriously messed up: self-harming, popping pills, previous abortions as a teenager in a whirl of casual sex. Abandoned, isolated, she plots to escape from the island somehow.

Underpinning the general story, there are lots of themes and ideas tossed into the pot, and for me it was just a little too much. There is a general nature versus humans’ scenario, the coastal erosion mirroring the twilight of the islanders in their old age. The neighbouring island has to be evacuated because of illicit dumping leading to gas explosions, and there is a sort of attempt to bring in a wider immigrant theme, as a boat carrying islanders from Duck is not allowed to land, and has to try elsewhere. The island spokesperson announces: ‘We’re not unsympathetic, this much I’m sure you understand. But you simply must respect the basic rules of our community.’ And there is another story thread whereby the Kid is employed by a Mrs Tyburn to digitise her family archive; but it is not simply that, for Mrs Tyburn is reinventing the past, and the Kid is ordered to digitally alter names, faces, body shapes, to create a ‘perfect’ memory to replace the reality.

So, all in all, whilst I enjoyed the book and admired the author’s lyrical style, I felt that there were a large number of ideas being mixed together that didn’t always fully work. The characterisation of the Kid as a vulnerable, angry teenager was quite well done, but I never really felt total engagement with her and the ending left me a little ‘meh’, to be honest, just a little underwhelmed. A promising author, for sure, and others will engage more with the story and the central character, but it’s only an OK read for me.
… (más)