Black Swan Green by David Mitchell
(Random House, $23.95)

Though I was a big fan of David Mitchell's 2000 novel Ghostwritten, I couldn't get through the British writer's widely praised follow-up effort, Cloud Atlas. Shortlisted for the 2004 Man Booker Prize, Cloud Atlas is a hugely ambitious and daring experimental novel that left me cold - quite possibly because I wasn't patient enough to wade through the increasingly inscrutable language Mitchell employs as the narrative ventures into futuristic territory.

I thought I'd give Mitchell a rest, until I read that his new novel is an accessible coming-of-age tale that has garnered favorable comparisons to J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye. After a bit of a slow start, I fell in love with Black Swan Green and gobbled it down in five days. At this point, I can't decide if I want this year's Man Booker award to go to Mitchell or Sarah Waters for her yummy World War II novel The Night Watch (I recently read that Mitchell is favored to win).

Black Swan Green is set in 1982 in a swanless English village called Black Swan Green. Over the course of 13 chapters that represent 13 consecutive months, narrator Jason Taylor chronicles his stammering problem, his humiliating run-ins with school bullies, his crushes on girls, his parents' frequent squabbling, and his attempts to keep his poetry a secret for fear that everyone will think he's gay for dabbling in rhyme schemes.

A few of Taylor's "adventures" are dull, but Mitchell writes hilarious dialogue that keeps the book zipping along even when the plot wears thin.