Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book

No man is an island some might say. There was no mention of a woman. Tove Jansson is the woman in question, she is gone now and left us a treasure to be found once again by new fans. Drawn and Quarterly, Montreal’s premiere graphic novel printer led the way with the reprinting of her Moomin illustrated yarns and the spillage is now overflowing with a new re-polished reprint of her newest old book called The Summer Book. This little trove is a story of a six year old girl and her grandmother.

The two polarities in age discover the basic themes of life in different perspectives pertaining to the generational divide and come to understand new things with each others eyes as though they were looking from inside out of each other. Sometimes the most basic relationships and the heart strings that attach us to a sentiment or thought of a captured moment in our youth will stick to us till our death. Tove Jansson is a classic writer and illustrator left unturned for many years, and most of us outside her native Finland are now discovering her work as a new experience. 

In the global village of thought, it is an amazing thing to comb through books forgotten such as this one. Truly Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book will be the advent to this summer which breams with new ideas. The quick page turner will put a smile and a little wonderment at the same time.


In The Summer Book, Tove Jansson distills the essence of the summer?its sunlight and storms?into twenty-two crystalline vignettes. This brief novel tells the story of Sophia, a six-year-old girl awakening to existence, and Sophia?s grandmother, nearing the end of hers, as they spend the summer on a tiny unspoiled island in the Gulf of Finland. The grandmother is unsentimental and wise, if a little cranky; Sophia is impetuous and volatile, but she tends to her grandmother with the care of a new parent. Together they amble over coastline and forest in easy companionship, build boats from bark, create a miniature Venice, write a fanciful study of local bugs. They discuss things that matter to young and old alike: life, death, the nature of God and of love. ?On an island,? thinks the grandmother, ?everything is complete.? In The Summer Book, Jansson creates her own complete world, full of the varied joys and sorrows of life.

Tove Jansson, whose Moomintroll comic strip and books brought her international acclaim, lived for much of her life on an island like the one described in The Summer Book, and the work can be enjoyed as her closely observed journal of the sounds, sights, and feel of a summer spent in intimate contact with the natural world. 

The Summer Book is translated from the Swedish by Thomas Teal.