Garmann's Summer-By:Stian Hole

I really liked this book. The only problem I had with it is that it didn't really flow together very well, each page was like a different paragraph about Garmann's summer. But yet they weren't really story. I can't even really describe it. I just haven't ever read anything like it. Garmann learns a lot about himself and others over the summer about fear, life and death and beginning and endings. It was hard for me to really hear the voice of Garmann in my head while I was reading, I think it was because all the illustrations made him look so shy and timid. He was a curious little boy and was really quiet and calm. He was an only child and his 3 crazy old aunts were visiting for the week. They taught him a lot, that its OK to be scared, you just have to face your fears sometimes. The story had a beginning and an end but the middle was a little foggy. It was hard for me to pick out the climax since the book was more of a compilation of different events. It surprised me that his mom and dad didn't have a bigger role in the story, especially since he is so young (only going into first grade). His aunts, that he sees once a year, seemed more important to him. I don't know if that was just for that week or if his parents took a backseat role and let him explore on his own, hence why he had so many questions for his aunts. I thought the illustrations were awesome! I was really interested in them and spent a long time looking at each one. Hole took each character and just repeated him/her through out the rest of the book. The aunts were the same individual person seen on the first page to the end of the book, so it was pretty easy to keep them all in line. Garmann never has a shirt on and always the same shorts, just a different facial expression. But the illustrations were so life like. They looked like each individual detail was clipped out of a magazine and glued precisely on the page. I think this would be a great book to read at the beginning of the year to students to allow the butterflies in every one's stomach to ease, because Garmann was very nervous for the first day of school.