Product Description

Summerland is the story of a young hero on a quest through the strange world of the American Faery. This is a fantasy for readers of all ages, set against the background of the American myth. The Clam Island fairies are in grave peril. War is coming, another battle in an ancient conflict. When the band sends for a champion, they get an 11 year-old boy named Ethan Feld. He hates baseball and wants to quit his losing team, but Jennifer T. Rideout loves baseball and won't let him quit. The two find themselves on a journey that includes zeppelins, werefoxes, Indian mythology, sasquatches, wendigos, and the haunted 161 year old husk of George Armstrong Custer. Finally Ethan becomes who he is: a changeling, a hero, and even a man.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1291725 in Books
• Published on: 2002-06-27
• Format: Audiobook
• Original language: English
• Binding: Audio CD

From Amazon.com
In Summerland, his first novel for young readers, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon attempts an American Narnia. Inspired by Lewis and Tolkien, he's created his own magical landscape on which to paint a sweeping fantasy quest, but mixes the same ingredients--folklore and new inventions--in a distinctively American way.

The plot is simple and pure, but takes a long time to tell. The setting is Clam Island, Washington, specifically the area on the western tip of the island known as the Summerlands, which enjoys zero rainfall and yearlong fine weather. Ethan Feld, a self-described really bad ball player, is recruited by a 100-year-old scout called Mr. Chiron "Ringfinger" Brown. Ethan is needed to help the ferishers, essentially fairies, to save their world from eradication. On the great infinite tree of worlds, Summerland is on the boundary between two such worlds, and a particularly destructive fairy called Coyote and his band of warriors are nearby and threatening to destroy everything.

Heroes are desperately needed to counter this threat, and their journey involves a lot of baseball, but also encounters with giants, bat-winged goblins, sea monsters, and assorted cunning magic. The novel features an ensemble cast of equal parts that shine and fade in turn, and yet the undoubtedly fine writing fails to mask the enormity and complexities of the world in which they travel, and the bad guys getting their comeuppance always seems so far away. Readers need to savor every word in Summerland to extract the best flavors from it. (Ages 10 and older.) --John McLay, Amazon.co.uk

Books in Canada
Michael Chabon’s first novel for young readers is a sadly disappointing fantasy fiction that jumbles together a mythic history of inter-world baseball, and includes denizens from any number of folk traditions including sasquatches, werewolves (werefoxes and weresquirrels too). Folklore figures like Paul Bunyan and his blue ox, Babe, as well as that mischievous First Nations trickster figure, Coyote, who Chabon here casts in the role of the ultimate villain, bits and pieces of Americana, a Tolkienesque Middle Earth which Chabon originally dubs the Middling (complete with ancient maps covered in runes and an extremely scaled down version of Ragnarok), and the end of the world from the perspective of Norse mythology. Summerland is much too long, running to almost 500 densely packed pages, and gets so bogged down in its many levels of layered tales that readers are likely to lose interest in the frame story in which young Ethan Feld sets off into the mythical Summerland to rescue his father and to stop Coyote from destroying life as we know it. Think W.P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe or The Iowa Baseball Confederacy mixed with Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water; add a dash of Tolkien, a sprinkle of Ian Fleming’s Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and a soupcon of Harry Potter and you have what Chabon hoped to achieve in Summerland. It’s obvious that Chabon doesn’t respect his young readers; otherwise he wouldn’t try to constantly deflect their attention from Ethan’s quest with bits and bites of story. Nor does Chabon respect the mythologies that he pilfers for use in Summerland—his “Ragged Rock” just doesn’t have the kick that it needs—he might check out British young adult writer Melvin Burgess’ Bloodtide to see how to use the Norse myths in a contemporary fiction—and his Coyote is malevolent to the core with no sense of the comic play that seems to be part of the traditional trickster’s tales. Chabon might have won the Pulitzer for his adult fiction, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay but he’s totally missed his mark in Summerland.
Jeffrey Canton (Books in Canada)

From Publishers Weekly
In his debut novel for young readers, Pulitzer Prize winner Chabon (The Adventures of Kavalier & Clay) hits a high-flying home run, creating a vivid fantasy where baseball is king. Following the death of his mother, 11-year-old Ethan Feld and his father, a designer of lighter-than-air-dirigibles move to Clam Island, Wash. The island is known for its almost constant rain, save for an area on its westernmost tip called Summerland by the locals which "knew a June, July and August that were perfectly dry and sunshiny." In Summerland, Ethan struggles to play baseball for the Ruth's Fluff and Fold Roosters, with dismal results. But here, too, a mystical baseball scout recruits Ethan and escorts him through a gateway to a series of interconnected worlds that are home to magical creatures called ferishers and an evil, shape-changing overlord called Coyote. Ethan and two of his fellow teammates soon accept a mission to save these other worlds (plus the one they live in) from ultimate destruction at Coyote's hand. When his father's well-being is also threatened, Ethan's quest becomes all the more urgent. To succeed, Ethan and his friends must find a way to beat giants, ferishers and others in a series of games where striking out truly has apocalyptic implications. Chabon unspools an elaborate yarn in a style that frequently crackles with color and surprise. He occasionally addresses readers directly, imbuing his tale with the aura of something that has been passed down through the ages. Impressively, the author takes a contemporary smalltown setting and weaves in baseball history, folklore and environmental themes, to both challenge and entertain readers. Images of the icy Winterlands and beasts like the werefox and Taffy the motherly Sasquatch recall C.S. Lewis's Narnia and some of Philip Pullman's creations in His Dark Materials. Devotees of the genre and of America's pastime will find much to cheer here. All ages.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.