cover image Cygnet

Cygnet

Season Butler. Harper, $26.99 (240p) ISBN 978-0-06-287091-9

Butler’s poignant, strange debut imagines a separatist community on an island in the Isles of Shoals, off the coast of New Hampshire. On tiny Swan Island, a 17-year-old known only as “The Kid” has found a tenuous place for herself in a retirement community, whose members call themselves Swans and whom Kid calls the Wrinklies. She was brought here months earlier by her drug-addicted parents, who left her, supposedly for a week or two, with her grandmother Lolly. Lolly has since died, and Kid, disliked by some of the residents and treated as a pet by others, ekes out a living by editing the diaries, videos, and photos of wealthy Mrs. Tyburn so that they reflect the past she would like to have had, one where she had “real breasts, grateful children, a husband whose eyes never wandered.” As Kid, who narrates the novel, approaches her 18th birthday, and erosion caused by storms threatens to topple the house where she lives into the ocean, she must decide whether to stay or go. While Kid often seems younger than her years, and the decidedly slim plot cleaves to the conventions of the coming-of-age novel, Butler has created an appealingly rich world with quirky, flawed characters and a dramatic landscape determined by the constant action of wind and water. Butler delivers a potent and finely calibrated novel.[em] (June) [/em]