CYGNET, a debut novel by Season Butler, is described by the publisher as a "meditation on death and life, past and future, aging and youth, memory and forgetting." The main character is a seventeen-year-old called Kid who has been left on an island with her grandmother and a bunch of other old people called Wrinklies. Her parents are supposed to return in a few weeks, but they do not and the island's inhabitants grow increasingly resentful of her presence. Kid is confused, lonely, and very angry, too, which makes this a difficult book to read.

HarperCollins Publishers and NetGalley provided me with an electronic copy of Cygnet. I was under no obligation to review this book and my opinion is freely given.

Seventeen year old Kid was left with her Grandma Lolly by her parents, who promised to return when they got their lives under control. Months later, her parents are no where to be found and her grandmother has passed away. Stranded on Swan Island at her grandmother's house, Kid does whatever it takes to make ends meet and keep a roof over her head. The problem is that her grandmother's community was set up to be elderly only, designed to allow the older set to escape the trappings and violence of the mainland. The Wrinklies call the rest of the world the Bad Place, but will their crumbling island make their return to their previous lives an inevitability? What will happen to Kid if she has to leave the security that Swan Island provides?

Cygnet represents a missed opportunity by the author to really explore the dynamics between the youngest member of the society and the rest of the island's residents. The novel was just there, with certain plot points that were totally unrealistic in nature. I never really felt fully invested in the characters, the setting, or the plot, finishing the novel mainly due to its length than anything else. For these reasons, I would be hesitant to recommend Cygnet to other readers.

What an odd story that had me so intrigued.

Cygnet by Season Butler is a coming of age story of a 17 year-old girl named Kid (that’s what they call her) who is sent to live with her Grandmother Lolly temporarily, on a remote island off the coast of New Hampshire called Swan Island. This island is inhabited solely by grumpy old people and its coastline is crumbling into the ocean.

Visitors are allowed only one day a month and “Kid” is not welcomed by most of the residents. Lolly eventually dies and “Kid” is left to fend for herself.

Abandonment, loneliness and isolation seeps through the pages of this novel. Butler has created a world of quirky, flawed characters that I couldn’t get enough of. Given the description of the community of Swan Island I thought this was a dystopian novel, I could see this being a film. Over a great read! 3 out of 5. Thank you, Harper Collins, for gifting me a copy in exchange for an honest review.

Published by Harper on June 25, 2019

The unnamed narrator of Cygnet complains that she is “marooned on a secluded island with no parents and instead of getting to do whatever I want I’ve got a zillion old grand-dorks bossing me around.” Her perspective as the only teen on an island of seniors is the source of the novel's sharp humor.

The narrator was sent to live on Swan Island with her grandmother. Social Services took her from her parents, making Swan Island a slightly better choice than juvenile prison. It is also a good place for the narrator to come of age as she confronts, more pressingly than most teens must, the choices that will determine her future.

The island itself is something of a prison, a place where elderly people isolate themselves from (and are passively hostile to) anyone who isn’t elderly. Most of the island’s inhabitants call the 17-year-old narrator Kid. She calls them Wrinklies. The Kid is from the Mainland, which everyone on Swan calls the Bad Place. The island is rapidly eroding; Kid awaits the day when her grandmother’s home washes into the sea. A nearby island is exploding because of improperly buried waste. Whether the mainland or the islands merit the term “Bad Place” is a matter of perspective.

After her grandmother dies, the Kid stays in her grandmother’s house, waiting for her parents to pick her up — every day, she convinces herself that their arrival is imminent — while working for a wealthy islander who has hired her to digitize the woman’s family history, editing as she goes to make it better. The Kid has amusing takes on her employer’s edited life, including the enlargement of her breasts in family photos and movies to match the results of the woman’s boob job. The woman reviews the Kid’s work long enough to replace her real memories with the better ones that the Kid has created.

In her free time, the Kid visits a woman who had a stroke, imagining herself as the woman’s lost mind. She has monthly sex with a boy named Jason she regards as her imaginary boyfriend. Jason comes to Swan to supply drugs to the Wrinklies (weed for glaucoma, acid for nostalgia). The Kid is in denial about her feelings, including her teenage jealousy, just as she is in denial about the parents who have effectively abandoned her.

The Kid’s mind is a maze of contradictory thoughts. I love the way her consciousness streams when she’s talking to Wrinklies. They take so long to express a thought that Kid has a dozen thoughts of her own before they finish a sentence. Some of her thoughts are hilarious; the rest, as thoughts tend to be, are on a spectrum from mundane to profound.

In the tradition of coming-of-age novels, the end of Cygnet is the beginning of a life. It might be a hard life, but the Kid gains strength and self-awareness from living on the eroding island, interacting with aging people who have gathered together to die. It might take them another decade or two before their lives end, but the Kid has scores of decades to live before she will be begin to live in decline. The island will be gone before she is ready to live there because everything erodes, everything changes. That’s the one unchangeable fact about life.

Cygnet mixes humor with touching moments in the lives of both the Kid and the seniors who tolerate (or resent) her presence. Season Butler creates a strong sense of place in Swan Island. She gives the Kid a full personality, slowing revealing facts about her childhood that help the reader understand her fears and insecurities, as well as her dreams and fantasies.

Growing up, Cygnet suggests, is about putting aside illusions of safety and embracing uncertainty. The Kid does that with such endearing anxiety that the reader can only cheer for her as she takes her first steps toward an unpredictable future.

RECOMMENDED

An unusual novel about a young woman left to fend more or less for herself on an island of older people who don't want her there. "Kid" narrates and her voice is clear and the language lovely. There are a lot of themes packed into this relatively slim read- youth versus age, bad decisions, global warming (for want of a better word), coming of age. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC. For fans of literary fiction.

3.5 stars rounded up .
This is an introspective book, a portrait of loneliness, not just the being alone kind of loneliness, but being among people and not wanted. Seventeen year old Kid, that’s what the elderly people on Swan Island call her. She’s the daughter of drug addict parents who leave her with her grandmother on the island where the “Swans” are living out their old age and they don’t much like having her around. When her grandmother dies, she’s left to fend for herself, waiting for her parents to come back as they promised, while the ocean wears away at the cliffs and she fears that the land around and under her grandmother’s house will fall. Flashbacks to the time before she arrived here reveal that her life was not very stable then either on the mainland, and her childhood not a very happy one, a lonely one then as well. But yet, she continues to believe that she has to stay until her parents return for her. There are some quirky people here, but a few of them are kind to her or at least tolerate her. Several things happen that move her to despair, but allow her to come to terms in a more realistic way about how to move forward with her life. There’s not much of a reprieve from that gut wrenching sadness Kid feels, but there is ultimately and thankfully the moment when she comes of age and to an understanding of what she has to do. A sad quirky and moving story. I’m bothered when characters go unnamed and I was here as well, but still I was able to feel for The Kid.

I received an advanced copy of this book from HarperCollins through NetGalley and Edelweiss.

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.

This book started off a bit weird and remained that way and that was why it was different from anything I read before. This is a deeply sad book and I couldn't help but feel alone throughout most of it and feeling angry after that. It has a happyish ending though. I liked the main character but couldn't help to be mad about her tireless love for parents that did not deserve it but hat only made it so much better when she finally started to grow out of it and realize that she was enough.

Thank you NetGalley and Harper for an Advanced Reader’s Copy of this book. This book was totally unexpected. It was a beautiful meditation on becoming an adult. This book is small but poignant, It covers so many areas in just a small book. It is very dark at times and even has a dystopian feel (though it is not) at times. Really enjoyed this one immensely.

What an odd book! Don’t get me wrong, it’s good. Season Butler is a hell of a writer. Butler’s diction and syntax throughout the whole novel are compelling and really help to piece together an entire world for the reader to get lost in. And it’s easy to get lost with the Swans and feel out of place while reading about our heroine trying to navigate her time on the island as she’s essentially been abandoned and rejected by just about everyone she knows. Ultimately, I think the novel’s biggest pit fall comes from slow pacing and aimlessness, two things that make sense in context as well as the atmosphere of the story Butler’s telling. Also, it’s difficult to pinpoint Kid’s arc. There’s a general sense of what she goes through from beginning to end, but I don’t think the end is as conclusive as I’d like it to be. But maybe that’s the point. I don’t know.

Overall, Butler is an incredibly talented writer, and Cygnet is a wonderfully original novel. For anyone who’s into the death positivity movement, you’ll certainly enjoy the themes surrounding death that are peppered throughout!

Strange, I always confuse the title with signet, but y makes all the difference, the meaning is a baby swan, someone on the brink of becoming a magnificent creature, so you’re going in expecting a coming of age story and that’s what it is. A story of a 17 year old young woman left on an island of old people by her insufficient parents. This story might have been the case of a setting outshining the protagonist. The island is so strange, its population are agists separatists, who want nothing to do with the mainland or anyone above retirement age, which creates for a singular experience. Especially for one as young as the girl. She finds ways to fit in, she works for an old eccentric lady determined to digitally optimize her entire past into a most acceptable version. She tries to make friends with some of the islanders. She sleeps with a dealer who visits island once a month to provide recreational enhancements. She waits for her parents. Meanwhile, the island is succumbing to the sea, making the very place feel temporary and fleeting, ephemeral in a way, much like those who live there. For them it’s a final destination, but for the girl it’s only a layover, she has (literally and metaphorically) reached the precipice and now has to make some decisions. Which is how coming of age stories usually go. The writing is quite good, but it is mainly a first person (and a very young persona t that) stream of consciousness kind of narration and so, while hauntingly lyrical in execution, this novel may not be for everyone. I enjoyed it, it read quickly, but it didn’t really wow. It was more of a thing to appreciate than love. It’s quite well done for a debut and a good read if you’re in a mood for a quiet sad (though not depressing) story. The island of Wrinklies is certainly its most memorable thing though, not the protagonist, despite the title’s suggestion. Thanks Netgalley.