ABAW: Summerland by Michael Chabon

Summerland by Michael Chabon

Hyperion Books 2002 (library copy)

Baseball is a beautifully simple and complicated game, filling our lives with useful metaphors. In the story of eleven-year-old Ethan Feld, his friends Jennifer T. Rideout and Thor Wignutt, baseball brings them together, sets them off on an unexpected adventure, and helps them to understand and cope with the joy and pain of their young lives. Every character in this story is missing something or someone. The characters hover at edges, never feeling completely part of one thing or another. In this story they are called shadowtails, part this, part that, and their liminality gives them the power to move through the universe in interesting ways. Chabon creatively redeploys familiar folk tales and mythologies in this adventure that will appeal to adults and kids. The baseball is populated with ferishers (like fairies, but don’t call them that), a diminutive giant, a heartbroken troll, a helpful werefox with no pants, a homemade zeppelina, an orange Saab with a a funny name, one very sad and sensitive sasquatch, and a talent scout named Chiron “Ringfinger” Brown who might just have been the hero-trainer you associate with Hercules. The prose is also colorful and bemusing, the careful words wrapping around us and transporting us with the magic of the Summerlands.

Ethan, who thinks the world is just the world, is unexpectedly recruited to be a hero, to save the tree that supports the four worlds that make up our known universe. He’s up against Coyote, the changer, who has kidnapped Ethan’s dad, and wants to poison the tree and bring about the end of the worlds, Ragged Rock, the end times. Nothing is simple in this story. Coyote isn’t all bad, for instance. He did invent baseball, after all. And even the good people make some bad decisions. Sometimes, in baseball like in life, a game, an inning, even an at-bat can change everything. When Ethan learns to accept the things that hurt him, he’s able to use that pain as a power source to finally swing for homeruns.

I listened to a few chapters of Summerland on audiobook read by the author (which I enjoyed) before deciding I had to share it with the Sonars.  We read this one out loud together, and none of us wanted it to end. Easily one of my favorite books I’ve read this year, perhaps for several years.