“If you show someone something you've written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin, and say, ‘When you’re ready’.” What an absolutely surprising delight of a book. I thought I would have nothing in common with this story of a young boy going through a year in the cold war in his little home town Black Swan Green where nothing really happens. Mitchell so successfully writes from the point of view of a preteen boy that I questioned my own memories at times! (That's dramatic... But you get what I mean.) A story that does not follow a typical arc, but instead glides through a "year-in-the-life" while properly tying lose ends -- which other stories usually do not do. Fantastic.