Reading: The Summer Book

[white_hart]

The Summer Book is a novel for adults by Tove Jansson, better known to most people as the creator of the Moomins. It's a slight book (I read it in an evening), slow and beautiful, a series of episodes from the lives of a grandmother and granddaughter spending a summer (or maybe several summers merged together) on an island in the Gulf of Finland, very like the one where Jansson and her own family spent summers.

The descriptions of the island and life in the archipelago are gorgeous, and I liked the grandmother a lot; part Moominmamma, part Esmeralda Weatherwax, but mostly just herself, a wonderful, engaging woman I felt I would love to meet. I found it harder to warm to the little girl, who came across as something of a brat, although that may be because I don't have a great deal of familiarity with little girls. Overall, though, this is a lovely book, and a book full of warmth and long summer evenings is a perfect read for chilly early March.

Comments

[cybik.livejournal.com]

The Summer Book is one of my favourites. I spent a few weeks with my family and our Finnish friends when I was 11 and 13, staying both times in our friends' summer house by the Baltic on the south coast of Finland. It was magical, and The Summer Book brings it all back every time I read it.

[andrewducker]

I've never visited Finland, but The Summer Book did make me want to visit.

[cybik.livejournal.com]

Absolutely and entirely worth it. I am thinking of going to Worldcon in Helsinki in 2017..

[white_hart]

How lovely! The nearest I have been is Stockholm, but I think the blueness of the sea and the clearness of the air are the same.

[cybik.livejournal.com]

Stockholm and Helsinki are similar in feel definitely. Stockholm feels more open because of the huge amount of water but the general cleanliness and friendliness are a common theme.

I love Scandinavia a lot. When in the very north of Norway we walked past flowers that you never think of having a smell and yet the air was so clean you could catch their scent without bending down.

[white_hart]

I really want to go back - we only had three nights each in Copenhagen and Stockholm, and it was all slightly marred by the fact that we were doing long-distance train travel just as the refugee crisis was becoming a crisis and there was a lot of uncertainty about travel arrangements, but it was amazingly beautiful.