Rick B. (bup) - , reviewed on 4/28/2011 + 166 more book reviews

This is the quietest great book I've ever read.

Every once in a while I read a book that makes me jealous, that makes me wish I could write and do what the book did. Like this one. It's a wisp of a book - brief, with no plot to speak of and only two real characters, no compelling crisis to drive the action, no suspense.

I almost cried when it ended.

It's like a watercolor of only four or five easy strokes, that you can't help but stare at for hours.

Yeah.

So, this girl Sophia and her grandmother, and by the way, her dad is there too but in Sophia's world he's just a background force, like the weather, and not a character. This girl Sophia and her grandmother do not do much, but spend lots of time together doing normal things on normal summer days that happen in no particular order, and I don't even think all the same year.

And it's just wonderful.

If you've ever read the Moomintroll books, this book has the same breezy disarming sense of humor.

I bet Tove Jansson could have written this review in 12 words, and it would have been better.

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