Scatter remembers hauling teenage boys to Tower Records Monday midnights to get Tuesday CD releases that went on sale at 12:01. We feel the same sense of anticipation describing Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book ($14, 184 pages), published today by NYRB Classics. We held back recommending a midnight raid on your local bookshop, but in the clear light of day, on the cusp of our own summer, we believe you should find it and read it, now!

Jansson, a Swedish-speaking Finn, is famous in Europe for her creation of a series of comic strips and children’s books about the Moomins, a family of hippo-looking creatures who inhabit a Nordic twilight of midsummer magic. (One of Jansson’s Moomins books is called Moominsummer Madness.)

In The Summer Book, published originally in 1972, she steps back from fairy tale to tell a story based on her adventures living several summers with a niece on a small granite island floating “like a drifting leaf” among other islands in the Gulf of Finland. It’s as if the Moomins turned about to write a mythic tale of humans. We hesitate to say it’s not a children’s story. Children might like it, but it’s really an adult’s story, reminding us what it is like to be a child and wonder why adults are so dumb.

The main characters are Grandmother and Sophia, who enjoy a combative but fiercely loving relationship. Grandmother is ill. Her heart is like the thumping engine of a herring boat “heading straight out to sea.” She feels life “gliding away.” While Sophia clings to every sensation, contests every fact.

Grandmother and Sophia explore life’s “ragged complexity” within the confines of the island’s insular habitat – beach, grass, bog, low trees and cave – where “everything functions according to rituals that are as hard as rock from repetition, and at the same time they ramble through the days as whimsically and casually as if the world ended at the horizon.”

Sophia clings obstinately to a single-minded child’s-play view of the world, even as Grandmother serves up life’s lessons about death, confusion, loss of innocence, and the tyranny of superstition. We wish we’d thought of this or that with our own kids; wish someone would have thought of that with us. For example, together they work through Sophia’s fear of death, which emerges in her sudden irrational terror at small animals, in a brilliant little hand-sewn book they write and illustrate called “A Study of Angleworms That Have Come Apart.”

Makes you wonder if old age is wasted on the old.

Incidentally, one could live worse than to read exclusively from NYRB Classics’ list of titles, about 200 by now, all unclassifiable, obscure or lost from view, except in these beautiful, pleasure-to-read editions. Great introductions, too.