grandmothers

The Summer Book by Töve Jansson is on its way to our shelves. This is a new-to-us old novel: a Scandinavian classic about a grandmother and her six-year-old granddaughter summering on a tiny island in the Finnish Archipelago, a cluster of more than 40,000 islands in the Baltic Sea. In short, flawlessly distilled chapters that feel complete in themselves—a bit like independent stories—events take place: the beach is combed, flora is observed, and, on a particularly marshy patch of shoreline, the city of Venice is constructed; worms are cut in half with a spade and a book is written about them

edited by Barbara Graham. This collections of essays by well-known writers/grandmothers is not the sweet book about being a nana that I was looking for. It's like a punch in the gut, actually. It's an honest look at what being a grandmother is really like for these women. There's no sugar coating here. These women have stories about their relationships (or lack of) with their adult children, their feelings about not seeing junior enough or seeing him too much. I recommend it because life is real. Someone may find something similar to their situation and feel comforted.