Cygnet is a powerful, poignant, smart debut novel by Season Butler. Her protagonist, known only as Kid, lives on an island otherwise populated entirely by elderly separatists. Ten miles off the coast of New Hampshire, Swan Island's inhabitants call themselves Swans, and they want nothing to do with the rest of the world, which they call the Bad Place. Seventeen-year-old Kid has no business there, but her parents abandoned her with her grandmother, who has since died. Now she works part time for one of the residents, digitizing and editing photographs, home videos and the woman's children's diaries. She spends her lunch breaks with an Alzheimer's patient, who has no memories to fix.
Swan Island is slowly crumbling into the sea, with Kid's grandmother's house set to go first: her backyard shrinks by the day, and Kid hates and fears the ocean, its relentless "waves that never tire of the same old dance moves. The cliff and the ocean, a mosh pit of two." The Swans are always going on about how you can view the sea from anywhere on their island; she doesn't see the appeal. With few exceptions, the Swans are cruelly frank about their displeasure at her presence, her very existence.
At the intersection of teen angst and sobering end-of-life realities, Cygnet contains some powerfully depressing material. But Kid's disarming voice and unlikely will to push forward save this novel from doom and gloom. Kid and the Swans have more in common than they think--age and youth being more alike than either perhaps accepts--and Butler's conception of this particular world-within-a-world is easy to lose oneself in. --Julia Kastner, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia