Cygnet

The Youngster doesn't know where her parents are. They left with a promise to come back but that was months ago, and now their seventeen-year-old daughter is stranded on Swan Island.

Swan isn't just any island; home to an eccentric old-age separatist community who have shunned life on the mainland, it is also slipping into the ocean, "a half-moon shape like the sea took an actual bite out of it." And for the seventy-year-old residents of Swan, The Youngster's arrival is a problem, an unwelcome reminder of the life they left behind and one they want rid of.

In Cygnet, Season Butler gives us the coming-of-age story we haven't heard before, about a young girl resisting the savagery of adulthood as a dying community rejects the promise of youth. As tender as it is tough, and as witty as it is ferocious, this is the work of a bold, fierce imagination, full of originality and charm. I was gripped by the raw, quippy vitality of Season Butler's sentences and the vividness with which she paints a world both familiar and strange - imagine Holden Caulfield as a character in Moonrise Kingdom.