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.

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