Word: summerland
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...clear to New York. I asked an old Mexican woman with a shopping cart where the water was. She said Superior. I thought that meant better: better than home, yes, I said. Really it was the name of the street to the sea. Sitting on a beach in Summerland, California, I thought about seasons, remembering, oceans, glory...
...this Chicago night, four suburban mothers sip white wine and Diet Coke while dissecting Michael Chabon's latest best seller. This could be any women's book group, save for the four boys, ages 11 to 14, who keep scarfing popcorn, cracking jokes and voicing their comments about Summerland, Chabon's highly touted children's novel. When the moms admit some confusion over Chabon's mystical baseball epic, Mason Marshall, 14, comes to their rescue. "A lot of it was mythology, Norse mythology and Indian mythology," he explains through a mouthful of popcorn...
...Wilmette mother-son group formed about four years ago in response to the mother-daughter groups that were springing up around them. "A mother-son group seemed kind of quirky and fun," says Claflin Marshall. Summerland, which is 500 pages and drew mixed reviews from the group, is one of about 30 books they have read. The boys' tastes are, well, pure boy: heavy on science fiction and fantasy (think Norton Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth and Patricia C. Wrede's Dealing with Dragons). The moms' picks have included Laurie Halse Anderson's historical fiction Fever 1793, the story...
...Summerland adapts Norse mythology, Native American folklore, American fables and Homeric myth, in addition to Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, to teach the enduring children's book lessons about finding strength within yourself. Like Sammy Clay, the self-doubting hero of Kavalier & Clay, Ethan goes through much of the book convinced that he is not up to the task assigned to him. Chabon himself has talked about feeling like a fraud sometimes, even as the reviews and prizes poured in. But the beauty of writing as an occupation is that personal anxiety just gives you one more way into your characters...
...science fiction," he says. "But I'm going to ignore the conventions of literary fiction as much as I can. And whatever kind of fiction comes out of that, I'm just going to hope I can bring readers along with me." They can start the trip at Summerland...