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A review by betweenbookends
The Summer Book by Tove Jansson
4.0
This gentle episodic novella follows six year old Sophia and her prickly grandmother over a sunlit and stormy summer in an island off the coast of Finland. The stories from their summer ebb and flow, happy times and more melancholic ones, the rich natural world of the island bursting off the page, and their conversations ranging from being trivial to transcendental matters of the heart.
There is an undercurrent of grief, of coming of age after an insurmountable loss, Sophia’s mother having passed away. But it’s far, far from being sentimental. In fact it feels more distanced, the island becoming a world of its own for Sophia and her grandmother, a place where realities outside of the island can’t quite touch them. A self contained bubble.
The novel is dotted through with Jansson’s simplistic and stunning illustrations that served as such a treat whilst reading. It is wise and equal parts whimsical and cynical. The juxtaposition of the young and the old; a volatile, precocious granddaughter and her resigned, slightly irritable grandmother somehow manage to surmise a lot of life in a way that feels very complete.
There is an undercurrent of grief, of coming of age after an insurmountable loss, Sophia’s mother having passed away. But it’s far, far from being sentimental. In fact it feels more distanced, the island becoming a world of its own for Sophia and her grandmother, a place where realities outside of the island can’t quite touch them. A self contained bubble.
The novel is dotted through with Jansson’s simplistic and stunning illustrations that served as such a treat whilst reading. It is wise and equal parts whimsical and cynical. The juxtaposition of the young and the old; a volatile, precocious granddaughter and her resigned, slightly irritable grandmother somehow manage to surmise a lot of life in a way that feels very complete.