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May 20, 2011

K.D. rated it:

Swedish-speaking Finnish Tove Jansson (1914-2001), author of Moomin books, was a lesbian. Coming from highly artistic family, she wrote and illustrated the famous "Moomin" children's book that came out after WWII when she felt like creating something "innocent." That children's book became the most popular series in Europe in the 40's and 50's.

Then came the death of her mother in 1972. Sad and grieving, she wrote The Summer Book which is now considered as a Scandi More...

5 comments like (6 people liked it)

Nov 25, 2011

bup rated it:

This is the quietest great book I've ever read.

Every once in a while I read a book that makes me jealous, that makes me wish I could write and do what the book did. Like this one. It's a wisp of a book - brief, with no plot to speak of and only two real characters, no compelling crisis to drive the action, no suspense.

I almost cried when it ended.

It's like a watercolor of only four or five easy strokes, that you can't help but stare at for hours.

Ye More...

0 comments like (4 people liked it)

Oct 10, 2011

Trish rated it:

Jansson captures not only a season but life itself with this short novel of a grandmother and her granddaughter summering on an island in the Gulf of Finland. The freshness of spring turns to the muggy veil of summer, and when August comes, our feelings of ending and loss are those we experience every year in this month.

Grandmother remains unnamed, perhaps to preserve that essential privacy that she explains to her friend Verner must always be reserved. But her granddaughter Sophia More...

2 comments like (2 people liked it)

Aug 08, 2008

Lesley rated it:

This is a book to savour. It is about an artist and her six-year-old grand-daughter, spending summer days together on a tiny island in the gulf of Finland. I am lingering over each thought-provoking episode. I think it is a book that Laura would enjoy. She was a child who inhabited storyworlds, like Sophia, and became deeply involved. I chose it because I remembered David reading Moomin books when he was small. Apparently this book is regarded as a modern classic throughout Scandinavia.

3 comments like (2 people liked it)

Nov 08, 2008

Ken rated it:

You have to applaud simplicity in writing. It is the hardest thing for a writer to achieve. That sense of keeping the book ‘small’ for lack of a better term, honing the story down to the barest strokes on the canvas. I always thought Hemingway did it beautifully with The Old Man and the Sea. Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson is another great ‘small’ book that draws you in with its perfectly simple prose and contstruction.

In many ways, Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book is closer to th More...

2 comments like (6 people liked it)

Mar 18, 2010

Bettie rated it:

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jan 08, 2009

Marie rated it:

What a wonderful book- just about perfectly written. I agree that simplicity in writing is difficult to achieve and Jansson does this with great sensitivity.

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Sep 02, 2011

Taylor rated it:

My favorite quotes:

“Grandmother worked only in old wood that had already found its form. That is, she saw and selected those pieces of wood that expressed what she wanted them to say” (15).

“Gathering is peculiar, because you see nothing but what you’re looking for. If you’re picking raspberries, you see only what’s red, and if you’re looking for bones you see only the white” (15).

“That’s strange,’ Grandmother thought. I can’t describe things any more. I can’t More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jul 27, 2011

Anna rated it:

I know this book is very popular, especially in the North, and is considered a huge classic. I grew up in a country where all other children except me seemed to like the moomins. I didn't like them, and I never liked Pippi Longstocking or similar fictional characters for children either. There were moomins everywhere, and what's worst is having a mum who likes the children's stuff when you can't stand that stuff in the age you are supposed to like it. Jansson was most famous for her "innoce More...

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Jun 20, 2011

Jean rated it:

I haven't read a "grown-up" book in ages, but this quietly reflective and sometimes stewing contemplation on life at a summer cabin, lured me in. I hoped to get a glimpse into ripples of author Tove Jansson's own bohemian-influenced life, as she had previously been known to me only as the creator of the famous Moomintrolls, whose radical whimsy I adore.
This is quite a departure from whimsy, yet felt genuine and satisfying to me. The Summer Book captures how life on a small island More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Mar 30, 2011

Rachel rated it:

I ended up enjoying this book a lot more than I expected. While there was no real, overarching plot I loved reading all of the little episodes about Sophia and her grandmother's adventures. Tove really captures the beauty of childhood and several of Sophie's profound statements about life actually made me laugh out loud. In places it was sad to see how frail the grandmother was growing, without Sophia really understanding. Despite there being no real conclusion, I felt that the characters had gr More...

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Nov 06, 2010

teresa rated it:

Tove Jansson is a Finnish author known best for her series of children's books about the Moomins. This book was written later in her life after the death of her mother. The book is a collection of vignettes about an elderly grandmother who knows she is not long for this world and her granddaughter whose mother has died not too long ago. It is about their summer spent on the family cottage on a remote Finnish island. It is not told in the American way a la Mitch Albom and that lot--cute little More...

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Jul 19, 2008

Steve W rated it:

This is a near perfect little book for summer (or anytime of year) with beautiful short vignettes of island life, childhood and family. It was just the book I needed at this time in my life--sweet without being saccharine, meditative without being forced.

On a personal note, it recalled childhood summers spent in Northern Minnesota Finn Country with my Grandmother's side of the family--great aunts and uncles, countless cousins, saunas, lakes. If only we had had an island cottage...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Dec 03, 2011

Isabel rated it:

Grandmother sat in the magic forest and carved outlandish animals. She cut them from branches and driftwood and gave them paws and faces, but she only hinted at what they looked like and never made them too distinct. They retained their wooden souls, and the curve of their backs and legs had the enigmatic shape of growth itself and remained a part of the decaying forest[return][return]A book about the relationship between a little girl called Sophia and her grandmother (based on the author's mo More...

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Dec 27, 2009

Eddie rated it:

A novel masquerading as a series of vignettes that subtly and cumulatively evoke what Summer means to a 6 year old girl who spends every day in one form of imaginative play or another with her grandmother (who's enjoying something of a new birth as she nears the end of her life). Her days are spent on a virtually uninhabited island in the gulf of Finland at a summer house the family returns to year after year, and the stories are dotted with botanical and daily life specifics (such as tossing al More...

4 comments like (4 people liked it)

Jun 23, 2011

Khulser rated it:

Exquisite. A child and her grandmother, unsentimental and astringent. The pair are as scoured as the tiny Finnish island on which they summer. The tiniest details assume epic proportions. The return of crushed mosses, driftwood collected, fireworks deferred, the visit of a taciturn neighbor. Who could resist the grandmother who breaks the lock on the McMansion of someone who has spoiled the view with his fantasy house on an adjacent island. Or the octogenarian who pauses in her rambles to light More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jan 29, 2011

Chris rated it:

The Summer Book is a beautiful book. It's as if Tove Jansson took someone's most lovely summer memories and put them into words. I was drawn to it at first because it is about living on an island during the summer in a Northern climate. Being an island dweller, I know the best time to experience life here is in the summer. Gentle summers create the memories I hold onto during the brutal winter months.

The Summer Book is a series vignettes chronicling the day to day life of Grandmother a More...

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Jan 11, 2010

Nicole rated it:

This is a quiet watercolor of a book. 'The Summer Book' takes place on a small island in the Gulf of Finland and sketches out scenes from the life of Sophia, a bright and tempestuous six year old who has lost her mother, and her paternal grandmother who is watching over her while Sophia's father attends to other matters. While there is no overarching plot excepting Sophia's coping with the death of her mother and her grandmother's graceful drifting towards the end of her own life, each chapter More...

3 comments like (1 person liked it)

Aug 11, 2011

Nicholas rated it:

A very beautiful book. I want to call it lyrical, though that might not be the right word, as it has a very sparse and almost unemotional feel to it.

The chapters are structures as 'vignettes', as it says in the back-copy, but really it is about a grandmother and her granddaughter, Sophia, living on a tiny island in the Gulf of Finland. The father is around, but barely enters the picture at all. It is briefly mentioned that the mother has died, and both father and Sophia seem to be tr More...

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Mar 04, 2010

Angie rated it:

The Summer House is a book I enjoyed very much - very gentle and touching (innocently and very cleanly written and with simple sparse language). The family (Grandmother, son and his 6-year-old daughter) spend the summer on a remote Finnish island which is uninhabitable in the Winter. The island is covered with brush-like shrubs and trees, bits of driftwood wash up on the beach constantly and the grandmother makes and sculpts creatures and figures out of these remnants and leaves them around the More...

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Oct 25, 2010

Newengland rated it:

Imagine it's the dusk of your life and you've stumbled upon an old leather journal kept in your youth, its pages smelling vaguely of the sea. It describes your life on a Finnish island once upon a time around, say, the 1920s. Larger than life on its pages is your grandmother, a quirky spirited type who was a gamer with her at-times insolent and demanding 6-year-old grandchild.

Grandmother did odd things. She made animals out of driftwood and populated a forest with them. She got u More...

3 comments like

Jan 01, 2011

Maria rated it:

Although billed as a novel, this book is actually a series of vignettes, not even short stories but beautifully written snapshots of moments during the summers spent on an island in the gulf of Finland. Mostly it is about a grandmother nearing the end of her life and her six-year-old granddaughter, just starting her life, with a few moments given to her son, Sophia's father. There is just enough written to spur the imagination and make the reader wonder why and how and what is really happening More...

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Aug 20, 2010

Ellen rated it:

Two fiercely independent females,a grandmother wise in her years and her impetuous granddaughter, Sophia,spend summers on one of Finland's outer islands. They manage to bump along together, evading the boringly sensible precautions laid down by Sophia's widowed father, whom the reader never gets to know well.

As you can imagine, this string of
stories rewards a reader who pays attention both to the smells, sights, and sounds of island life and to the nuances of the bond between More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Oct 23, 2010

Amy rated it:

If someone forced me to choose my favourite book of all time - and I mean really forced, because the idea of choosing just one is really horrible (I'd need a top 30 AT LEAST) - I think I would chose this book.

I find it hard to describe how much this book means to me but these small, heart-warming and utterly charming stories of Sophia, her grandmother and her father on their very own island for a summer are just perfect. Perfect. I would not change a single thing about this. Tove Ja More...

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Jul 08, 2010

Adrienne rated it:

a lovely collection of short stories that when put to together make up the summer book::stories about the time spent on her families holiday island with her grandma::and other childhood memories::the book is written in the stlye of a novel but is in large (so i am led to believe)auto/biographical:: a wonderful read from the author of the moomins::

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jan 31, 2011

Rebecca rated it:

I enjoyed Tove Jansson’s novel The Summer Book very much and flipping it through it just now to prepare to write this post, I realized how much I would like to read it again. It’s a book that works quietly, and I think it’s easy to miss some of its effects on a first read. On a basic level the book is about a young girl Sophia and her grandmother, who live, along with Sophia’s father, on an isolated island in Finland. The fact that I noticed but didn’t ponder enough during the first reading is t More...

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Oct 14, 2009

Material Lives rated it:

This exceptional little book revolves around a precocious young girl and her contentious, wild, beautiful relationship with her cantankerous grandmother, who lives by herself on an island. We find out immediately that the young girl's mother has died, and her father, frozen in a state of trauma and unable to care for her, takes her to live with her grandmother. This book is filled with inquisitiveness, imagination, sharp dialogue, and wit. It is a meditation on what it means to love, lose, and d More...

3 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jan 01, 2011

Elizabeth rated it:

This novel was more like a series of vignettes, all rendered in lovely prose that was at once impossibly simple and incredibly complex. The book takes place the summer after its protagonist has lost her mother (the details of this loss are unclear) and she is spending the summer with her grandmother and father on an island off the coast of Sweden. The book not only capture the wonder that is youth, but also interestingly pairs it with the beauty of ageing and solace. The grandmother/granddaughte More...

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Jul 18, 2011

William rated it:

I read this slowly over about three months, which seems to be a good way to read Jansson's novels, Moomin or otherwise.

This non-Moomin tale of a young girl named Sophie spending her summers on an island with her Father and Grandmother after the death of her mother is more a collection of scenes from this life than a cohesive narrative. Each scene, however, is poignant and emotional. The stories revolve around life on their little island, and trips to surrounding areas, and are filled More...

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Jul 02, 2011

Adam rated it:

A young girl lives on an island with her grandmother and barely-seen father. There is no one else there, only the sea and the bog and the weather. Occasionally, a new friend will float on by; between these events, the young girl struggles with the death of her mother, though she is only mentioned once.

The book is a series of evocative vignettes and will work for you depending no how you feel about them. They do a good job of exploring the relationship between the grandmother and gra More...

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