Tove Jansson, The Summer Book **** 1/2

The Summer Book is a quiet, meditative novel about a six-year-old girl and her grandmother spending time together at their summer house on an island in the Gulf of Finland. The girl's father is there too, always in the background (he has a single line of dialogue, three pages from the end). Her mother has recently died, which no one talks about but which accounts for the existential undertone to many of the conversations.

The book consists of twenty-two "crystalline" vignettes about everyday life on the island, each one nearly a standalone story. Jannson's writing has lovely imagery that merely suggests the associated emotional depths. As Ali Smith says on the back cover, "Her sentences [are] simple and loaded; the novel reads like looking through clear water and seeing, suddenly, the depth."