This book has found an audience outside of its native Finland, and is a sweet story of a grandmother and the daughter of her son, who keep each other company on an island in the Finnish archipelago one summer. They learn from each other’s temperaments and inform each other with new perspectives. I can’t recall that I’ve yet read a book focussing on that most precious of intergenerational bonds, the grandparent-grandchild relationships, but this one does it very well. It also captures the sense of the Nordic summer very well, since summer has a very important function in an area that is basically cold and dark three quarters of the year. Each chapter is its own little vignette about something that happens as the summer progresses, and the novel ends with the onset of autumn. Jansson is adept at finding apt wordings to describe intangible mood changes and atmospheric shifts. One of my favorites is “they each settled in to their own silence” to describe when two people fall awkwardly silent. It is also exotic to read some of the expressions and vocabulary of Swedish-Finns as a Swedish Swede, because they have certain funny archaisms and a whole dictionary of the own. My biggest take-away with this book however, was the realization, mid-book, that my own (as yet unborn-but-growing) child will grow up with three grandparents, none of which will be my father.
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Kinship of all Species 