In the hands of a master, 13 becomes a golden age

And what a dazzling point of view it is. Jason Taylor, 13, is a Holden Caulfield for the Margaret Thatcher era. His family baggage includes an equally Salingeresque brilliant older sister, an unhappy mother , and a clueless father -- all guaranteed qualifications for precociousness. Bullied and unpopular, Jason is a crackerjack social scientist able to parse degrees of coolness with a single sentence. ``It's all ranks, being a boy, like the army." Such people-smart instincts caution him to publish his poems under the pseudonym Eliot Bolivar. If his classmates knew the poet's true identity, ``they'd gouge me to death behind the tennis courts with blunt woodwork tools and spray the Sex Pistols logo on my gravestone."

What really dooms Jason, however, is his stammer. He can't tell his father what he really thinks because `` if I stammer with Dad, he gets that face he had when he got his Black & Decker Workmate home and found it was minus a crucial packet of screws."

In January, when the book begins, Jason's stammering is at its worst. During that cruelest month, he smashes the watch his grandfather always wore, even on the day he died. Alas, it's not just the watch that shatters: Tension colonizes the family dinner table; ``Mum was just sitting there . It didn't feel at all right." A phone rings in the forbidden territory of his father's office; when he picks it up, nobody answers. His sister Julia is about to go to college. Skating on the lake, he sees the ghost of the butcher's boy who fell through the ice. That the world is a puzzle is no more surprising than the curious fact that ``there aren't any actual swans in Black Swan Green."