From the Bookshelf of Constant Reader…

The Summer Book

Tove Jansson,

Esther Freud (Contributor)

Start date: July 15, 2020

Finish date: August 1, 2020

Discussion: Reading List

Discussion leader: Barb

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Reading List

* The Schedule for July through Dec. 2025
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What Members Thought

Oct 17, 2010 Ken rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: finished-in-2010, classics-newly-read

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 up in the middle 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 up in the middle of the night and wandered in the dark for the sea, just so she could catch sight of the hard-to-witness long-tailed ducks called scolders when dawn approached. She snuck cigarettes. If she was tired, she would lie down in the sand -- mid-adventure and all -- and go to sleep. She could man a boat and figure the weather. She was on intimate terms with the island's creatures, its insects, its moods.

Before long, you're sentimental as hell. It's another world you've stumbled upon, one both familiar and foreign thanks to time. What if, you wonder, what if you fixed this up, brought it to life again like God breathing into the lungs of Adam?

Such might have been the scenario for Tove Jansson when she created the persona Sophia to represent herself as a 6-year-old and wrote THE SUMMER BOOK. Episodic in nature and with some episodes stronger than others, the book will not entertain you with plot but is at peace with itself despite this. It is simply written. It is all about character and mood. It is a speak, memory kind of deal where you had better be a reader with patience and a love of nature. Also, if one relative had a huge role in your childhood, you're likely to relate. Sophia doesn't always treat her grandmother with respect and kindness, but there's an unmistakable bond here.

So, that's what it's like, or at least the best as I can describe it. The book is like reading a rewritten and well-polished journal. To expect more than that is to court disappointment, so if you read it, get yourself in leisurely, summer mode. You know, like you get on a July vacation where you forget what day it is and don't care what time it is, either. That's the book's approach, and in that sense, it becomes a perfect metaphor for both the season and the storybook time it recreates so well. ...more

40 likes · Like · see review

May 31, 2011 Jenny (Reading Envy) rated it really liked it

Shelves: cold-weather-islands, novella, read2011, location-finland

Sweet and sad.

15 likes · Like · see review

Jan 17, 2011 Rosana rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 2014

I finished this book yesterday, but I cannot let go of it. I loved the portrait of childhood against that of aging – the child and the grandmother seem to have met in that curve of life, even if one was climbing it and the other was descending it. It left me too with a sense of nostalgia for my own grandmothers, which were never as quirk as the one in the book, but that at moments allowed themselves to break the rules, to eat dessert before the meal so to speak.

Without planning, I have read a f ...more

7 likes · Like · see review

Jul 15, 2020 Barbara rated it it was amazing

Such a beautiful book.

2 likes · Like · see review

Jul 29, 2020 Ruth rated it liked it · review of another edition

Beautiful as it was, I kept wondering why the writing style seemed as if it were meant for a child's book, yet the book seemed targeted towards adult readers. For that reason I knocked my rating down a peg. ...more

1 like · Like · see review

Jul 08, 2020 Katy rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, ageing

It sounded promising - a grandmother with her grandaughter spending a summer on a small island in the Gulf of Finland. What could they learn from one another? Apparently nothing. By inference perhaps the grandmother imparts some lessons to her granddaughter, but to me they both seemed disconnected, involved in their own thoughts, rather indifferent to one another. Sophia recently lost her mother. Her father shares the cabin with his daughter and his mother. He brings supplies from the mainland a ...more

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Oct 07, 2025 William rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2025

A terrific book in a very quiet way. It transports the reader to the small island where a 6 year old girl spends a Finnish summer with her father and, more importantly, her grandmother. The two share experiences good and bad, happy and sad. She behaves as one would expect a six year old to do, sometime screaming at her grandmother, often letting her imagination run free, often expressing wonder at what she discovers. Through it all, a wonderful bond is forged.

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Jul 28, 2012 Linda rated it it was amazing

Shelves: fiction, finland

Beautiful, as much poetry as fiction. Jansson captures the numinous quality of summer and the relationship between grandmother and granddaughter. Nothing much happens, really, which makes it one of my favorite types of books.

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