Edit: just over a week after reading ‘Cygnet’ it’s theme of a group of over 65s, isolating themselves on Swan Island now seems to be chillingly prophetic. I have amended my rating to reflect this.

My thanks to Little Brown Book Group U.K. /Dialogue Books for an eARC via NetGalley of ‘Cygnet’ by Season Butler in exchange for an honest review. It was published in April 2019. My apologies for the late feedback. Its paperback edition will be released on 7 May 2020.

The unnamed seventeen-year-old narrator of this novel has been left with her grandmother, Lolly, on Swan Island by her drug addicted parents. They want to get clean and promised to come back for her in a couple of weeks but that was six months ago.

Swan Island is located off the coast of New Hampshire and is home to an eccentric separatist community in which all residents are 65-years old and over. They have made a temporary exception for the Kid due to Lolly, yet she has recently died in the hospice on the island. Now the Kid’s future on Swan Island is less certain though it is clear some of the residents are quite fond of her.

The Kid continues to live in Lolly’s cottage located on an isolated cliff top and uses her skills with computers to make a little money while she tries to track down her parents. However, the cliff is unstable and it’s only a matter of time until it crumbles and the cottage falls into the ocean.

The Swan Island community is rather hippie-like and distances itself from the rest of the world, which they have dubbed the ‘Bad Place’. Its members refer to themselves as Swans, though the Kid privately refers to them as the ‘Wrinklies’.

I found this quite an introspective coming-of-age novel as the Kid contemplates her internal world and loneliness as well as what might be out there if she leaves Swan Island in terms of economic hardship, climate change, and political upheavals.

Butler’s writing is evocative and lyrical, with flashes of wry humour. The Kid is imaginative and weaves stories for herself in the midst of her loneliness. She is practical in many ways and yet yearns for the return of her dysfunctional parents, even though it is clear that her life with them was unstable. I found myself caring for her.

While set in 2015 there is a sense of Swan Island being out of time. Their attempt to create a safe and rather fun place for their members to live out their final years seemed admirable and it was a pity that more couldn’t have been receptive to having a cygnet as part of their community, though I did think that the Kid needed to re-engage with the wider world.

4.5 stars rounded up to 5 for prescience

I felt that ‘Cygnet’ was very much a work of literary fiction, which can be a little more challenging than a standard coming-of-age tale though hopefully it will have found its audience.

‘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.

(With thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for an ARC of this title.)

Cygnet is a wholly original coming-of-age novel and a great debut which is effectively a meditation on the difficulty faced by teens who are transitioning into adulthood; a feeling we all know personally. Ms Butler explores issues surrounding loneliness, social isolation, bullying, self-confidence, confusion, love, parenting, family relationships, desperation and drug addiction. It's a well-told story which was rather moving as The Kid manoeuvred her way around the dystopian landscape she inhabited. There is a profundity to it all that is often missing in books featuring youngsters so I found that very refreshing.

All in all, this is a bleak and disturbing work of fiction with some insightful rumination and wonderful depiction of the Isle of Swan and the characters, especially the elderly known in the novel as wrinklies. I thought the lack of named characters was a superb idea to showcase the issues with which they were suffering and making them the central aspect of the story. What is illustrated adeptly is the differences and similarities between the old and young and that each age group has its own struggles to contend with.

Many thanks to Dialogue Books for an ARC.

I am sorry but this is not my type of book. I tried really hard to get interested in the story. I ended up feeling disappointed in the book.

Thank you to Netgalley for my copy..

This novel is about a girl dealing with feelings of abandonment and rejection, isolation and loneliness.

Cygnet is a novel about loneliness and isolation, and about hope and moving past hope to something else. A seventeen-year-old girl lives on Swan, an island home to an old age separatist community. She is the outsider, there because her parents disappeared months ago and never came back for her. The old people on the island are hostile, with her as a reminder of the world they want to be away from, and she battles her own loneliness as she waits for her parents to appear.

This is a novel written in a distinctive style with a memorable narrator, a kind of coming of age novel that highlights differences and similarities between old and young. The narrator's desperation really comes through, and her sense of being an almost-adult who has formed routines in a place not made for her. It feels both timeless and preoccupied with a modern sense of the end of the world. The combination of wildness and sea, depression and loneliness, and quirky side characters makes this a novel that will appeal greatly to some people, though personally I didn't quite click with it.