Summerland
Ratings12
Average rating3.7
Ethan Feld is having a terrible summer: his father has moved them to Clam Island, Washington, where Ethan has quickly established himself as the least gifted baseball player the island has ever seen. Ethan’s luck begins to change, however, when a mysterious baseball scout named Ringfinger Brown and a seven-hundred-and-sixty-five-year-old werefox enter his life, dragging Ethan into another world called the Summerlands. But this beautiful, winter-less place is facing destruction at the hands of the villainous Coyote, and it has been prophesized that only Ethan can save it.
In this cherished modern classic, the New York Times bestselling, Pulitzer Prize winning author brings his masterful storytelling, dexterous plotting, and singularly envisioned characters to a coming-of-age novel for readers of all ages.
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I think this will be a really entertaining book for teens that enjoy fantasy and mythology or tall-tales. It's not as much about baseball as about the fantasy land Chabon creates and the relationship of father and son. I've had a few students read it that really enjoyed it as well. I'm glad Chabon is doing stories for teens as well!
The description sounds good, eh? I read this aloud to the kids. About a hundred pages in I started having misgivings. I did not enjoy this book. But the kids would've been out of sorts had I not finished it (they'll listen to almost anything). I don't really have anything good to say about this book. While I've read other books by the author and really liked them, this one counts as a FAIL. (For the record, my wife really enjoyed it.) Here's what I didn't like about it:
a) the writing style: too flowery; hard to read aloud; choppy sentences that went all over the place
b) the story: take a bunch of folklore, myth, and baseball and mix it all up into a miasmic stew. And I couldn't follow it very well. New things seemed to be added willy-nilly. Tangents would shoot off in mid-sentence so that I'd lose track of what the subject was supposed to be. Didn't get any sense of suspense either. The climax was anti.
c) the length: 500 pages! what a mess.
I hated this.
(Read the 1-star reviews on Amazon, they're spot on.)
