I had such a good start to my reading year, but in the last month or so I’ve had a run of books that I found merely okay without being memorable, that I was completely neutral about (neither category worth reviews), or that I outright disliked (and yet could not stop reading since I was inevitably on holiday and short of reading material) – I just had three in a row in this latter category during my week in Vietnam.

(If you really want to know, they were Girl Meets Ape by Chris Manby, Travels in the Scriptorium by Paul Auster, and The Girl Who Played With Fire by Steig Larsson.)

When you’re becoming disillusioned with reading, it’s time to bring out the secret weapon: books on the backlist of newly discovered favourite writers. So I turned to Michael Chabon and his young adult novel, Summerland.

Ethan is a young boy who has lost his mother and is struggling to find his place on his new home’s baseball team. With his oddball friends, Jennifer T. and Thor, he is recruited into help save the Summerlands, a faerie-type world parallel to our own, and discovers his own strengths and talents.

In many ways, this book reminded me of one of my favourite YA books, The Hounds of the Morrigan by Pat O’Shea, published over 20 years ago now. That featured a 10-year-old boy struggling with loss, who, with his sister and led by a spirit guide, travels into the world of Irish myth and legend. Summerland, though very different in style and characters, takes an 11-year-old boy into Norse and Native American myth and legend. There’s also a very strong baseball theme and it’s to Chabon’s credit that even this held my attention despite my complete lack of knowledge of or interest in this sport (I’m Australian, our stick-and-ball sport is cricket).

It had all the elements I enjoy about Chabon’s writing: firstly, his technical proficiency. The man is a literary writer without falling for the fads in literary writing. Someone on a message-board (paraphrasing someone else) put it like this: that people either look for windows into other worlds or mirrors of our own, and the desire at the moment is for the latter.

This unfortunately leads to things like detailed descriptions of a character, for example, raising a window shade: “When he reaches his destination, he thrusts out his right hand, takes hold of the bottom of the shade, and gives it a quick tug, hoping to engage the spring that will send the shade flying upward.” (from Travels in the Scriptorium, p39). Do readers need that long of a description for something we’ve all done or seen done? Really?

Or it leads to authors apparently feeling driven to tell you that a character woke up at 7am and had breakfast at the 7-Eleven, or did their laundry – first underwear and t-shirts, then jeans (The Girl Who Played With Fire was terrible for adding in these kinds of details, I suppose for veracity, but it just made the book bloated and dull to me).

The worst example I have ever seen combined both techniques so that the reader was subject to a couple of paragraphs of sorting the laundry before putting it in the machine and adding powder etc.

But if you’re going to be a mirror of everyday things, you need to reflect them in a way that makes the reader look at them in a different way. Otherwise what’s the point (or do other readers find laundry a lot more fascinating than I do? I don’t read to be reminded of chores). And Michael Chabon manages that, I think, and therefore he is both mirror and window.

Secondly, it has the subtlety and quiet humour that I so appreciate about Chabon’s books. Do we get a great big paragraph about how Ethan’s mum died and now he’s lonely and lost and stuck with the other outcast children? No, we don’t need to be told that when we’re so effectively shown (see, Chabon knows the rules and knows how to use them properly) with gentle brushstrokes.

And lastly, it’s a good story with good characters, the most important thing for any book. I was impressed especially with just how much of a journey mild-mannered Ethan has to go on before he is ready to be a hero.

Refreshed by a favourite writer, I am now steeled for plunging back in to trying out new authors.

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