(Not that anything I say will actually ruin the story since their really isn't much of a story that can be ruined. But perhaps I'll say too much, reveal too much of the magic that would've been found on your own.)
It's a story of a little girl named Sophia and her grandmother who live on an island in the gulf of Finland, coming every Summer and leaving every Fall. It's a simple story, possibly simplicity at its best. It's told in a very straight-forward manner yet loaded with little jewels of wisdom that pop up here and there.
In fact, The Summer Book is more like a collection of short stories rather than one long sweeping novel. It's told in little episodes that occur throughout the Summer between Sophia and Grandmother. And Sophia and Grandmother is where the magic lies.
The only other main character in this story is Papa, Sophia's father and Grandmother's son, but he's really more of a secondary character who's always there, but only in the background as more of a silent comfort who never speaks throughout the whole book. The story is all about the little girl and the old woman, two people with vast oceans of time and experience between them but who are alike because of this - both too young or too old to really be on their own. They are each other's playmates, co-conspirators, comforts.
The conversations between the two are rather funny but also touching, often wise. In "The Cat" Sophia says "It's funny about love. The more you love someone, the less he likes you back." wherein she speaks volumes but merely about the cat who "was flattened with hugs, endured them politely, and climbed back into the dish box. He was entrusted with burning secrets and merely averted his yellow gaze."
Grandmother often has advice for young Sophia, such as in "The Neighbor" where she says:
" 'No well-bred person goes ashore on someone else's island when there's no one home. But if they put up a sign, then you do it anyway because it's a slap in the face.'
" 'Naturally,' Sophia said, increasing her knowledge of life considerably."
But then little Sophia has wisdom of her own when she talks about a worm cut in two and what happens with each half:
"I think they looked at each other and thought they looked awful, and then crawled away from each other as fast as they could. And then they started to think. They realized that from now on life would be quite different, but they didn't know how, that is, in what way... Presumably, everything that happened to them after that only seemed like half as much, but this was also a sort of relief, and then, too, nothing they did was their fault any more, somehow. They just blamed each other. Or else they'd say that after a thing like that, you just weren't yourself anymore... It can probably remember it's other half which went first and made all the decisions... Should I go on following and never have to make any important decisions, or should I be the one who always knows best, until I come apart again? ...But maybe the front end thinks it's nice not having anything to drag around behind it... Nothing is easy when you might come apart in the middle at any moment."
Repeat:
"Nothing is easy when you might come apart in the middle at any moment."
