Passing on the baton to our children seems like an obvious idea, but Jansson’s depiction of the magic bond that can be developed between the elderly and children is nothing short of a miracle, a gem to be treasured, nurtured and understood as one of those important things that give meaning and purpose to life. Within the family, Sophia says, “there was just an unexplained but self-evident tolerance for whomever”. As a child, she was never explicitly told about the nature of Tove and Tuulikki’s relationship – homosexuality would still have been classified as an illness in Finland at the time – but she could see that they loved one another, and that the other members of her family accepted them. It was perfect, actually, as this is a story about wildness, both the wildness of living on a small island in the Gulf of Finland and the wildness of living with fewer social conventions and conveniences. Jansson transports us to this island and helps us to see it through the loving eyes of a person who has known it forever and the wondering eyes of a person who is just discovering all its hidden treasures. I kept thinking of another work of this type, The Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Stories, in which the natural environment is almost a character itself. The Summer Book gave me that same immersed feeling.

I received a complimentary ARC edition from Geoffrey Simpson! This is my honest and voluntary review. There's a father in the story, though he never bores us with anything he has to say, and a sexy, loner neighbor named Eriksson who I hoped to God looked like this: Damned child Grandmother thought. Confounded children. But that’s what happens when people won’t let you do anything fun. The people who are old enough”. Grandmother‘s world was shrinking—Sophia’s world was stretching. The space between them became the larger space between both of their lives. It’s clear to me that this novel between a grandmother and a granddaughter….was very personal to Tove Jansson.There is nothing comforting about it, and yet if you are afraid to see it in his own terms and look to it for comfort, for solace, you’ll be left worse off than you were before”. I find this sort of writing – which has no real plot but is all about exploring characters – very hard to do and I am always lost in admiration when I see it done well. Sophia and Grandmother strike me as absolutely real, but even the cameos are brilliantly described – Jansson has a real flair for these thumbnail character sketches, unusual and specific: The novelist Ali Smith, reviewing the book in The Guardian, wrote that Jansson was better known for her Moomin books than for her novels, and that with her worldwide fame, she knew the virtues of withdrawal. In Smith's view, The Summer Book is an astonishing achievement of artistry, "the writing so lightly kept, so simple-seeming, so closely concerned with the weighing of moments that any extra weight of exegesis is too much." [2] Telling the tale of the child and her grandmother in the simplest language, Smith writes, "The threat of brevity, even on this timeless island in this timeless, gorgeous summer, is very marked. But Jansson's brilliance is to create a narrative that seems, at least, to have no forward motion, to exist in lit moments, gleaming dark moments, like lights on a string, each chapter its own beautifully constructed, random-seeming, complete story. Her writing is all magical deception, her sentences simple and loaded; the novel reads like looking through clear water and seeing, suddenly, the depth." [2] Smith praises Thomas Teal's English translation as "original and stunning". [2] There is an absence that haunts the book -- or rather the two characters --, mentioned early on, as Sophia wakes and remembers: "she had a bed to herself because her mother was dead". I was ready to move in with the family and spend the second half of my life on their blustery, small island filled with quirky, faraway neighbors and weird wood carvings of animals.

Walter Anderson's Father Mississippi, carved from an oak tree that fell during a 1947 hurricane. It weathered away over the next ten years. Only the deer in the left foreground survived.) I)t manages to make you feel good as well as wise, without having to make too much effort. (...) This book is in danger of taking itself rather too seriously; there is a lot of home-spun philosophy but only rare flashes of humour, which nevertheless are very funny. But what makes The Summer Book rise above the realm of happy thoughts for grim times are the observations on being young and growing old: the girl's desperation not to appear frightened of deep water, her grandmother's determination not to let her see that she knew she was." - Dea Birkett, The Independent Everything was fine, and yet everything was overshadowed by a great sadness. It was August, and the weather was sometimes stormy and sometimes nice, but for Grandmother, no matter what happened, it was only time on top of time, since everything is vanity and a chasing after the wind.”I never really knew either of my grandmothers as they both lived in Italy. This book made me yearn for a relationship I never had. Jansson's] writing is all magical deception, her sentences simple and loaded; the novel reads like looking through clear water and seeing, suddenly, the depth.