"Summerland" is Michael Chabon's entry into the youth fantasy genre, and it's not a bad read, but I would really call it an adult's kid book. It's not "Harry Potter" or "The Thief Lord" which are geared toward a youth market.
The story is set on fictitious Clam Island in Washington state's San Juan islands, where there is a place on the western side of the island that never sees rain during the summer. This is Summerland, and it is where the local little league teams play their games.
An eleven year old boy on one of the teams, Ethan Feld, is not much of a ballplayer, but he's friends with Jennifer T. Rideout, one of the best players on the team. There's also Thor Wignutt, a player who thinks he's an android and talks like Data from Star Trek. One day Ethan begins having strange visions of bushbabies near the field and on the roadside. The creature is actually a werefox named Cutbelly, and meeting him is the beginning of Ethan's adventure.
Ethan's father is an inventer and tinkerer who has come up with a material used in a portable blimp that they fly around the island. It turns out that a certain character wants to use the material to hold a substance so that he can bring about the end of the world. Once Mr. Feld is kidnapped, it's up to Ethan, his friends, and an odd assortment of characters that they meet along the way, to save the day.
It's kind of like "The Lord of the Rings" meets "The Bad News Bears" with a liberal dose of random mythologies thrown in for spice.
For example, we have the "ferishers" who are dimunitive creatures (faeries?) that excell at baseball and scampering between the various world/dimensions known as the summerlands, the winterlands, and the middling (our world) with the gleaming as the great world shut off from the rest. The ferishers call humans "reubens" or "rubes." It's a takeoff on a greenhorn ballplayer.
The end of the world is called "Ragged Rock" which comes from the Norse mythology "Ragnarok."
And, the antagonist is Coyote, popular in Native American lore and akin to Loki, a trickster and master of change. Coyote also invented baseball, and Chabon uses baseball both literally and metaphorically to move the story forward.
I liked the blending of the various mythologies, especially the sequence involving Ethan's team playing against a team made up of the "liars" which are characters from tall tales like John Henry, Paul Bunyan, etc.
Ethan must save his father, and the world as well, while developing his new position of catcher and dealing with an unfinished magical "bat" made from an ash wood branch taken from the great tree of the universe. There's another link in that baseball bats are made from ash and this type of wood allegedly holds magical properties.
Jennifer must develop into a pitcher, and deal with some of her family issues.
I enjoyed the story, but I'm not sure if kids in the 12-15 age group will grasp all of the literary subtleties, but then again maybe so. I enjoyed Chabon's use of the language and thought the story was well-told, although the characters did not always come off as wholy sympathetic. If you like baseball and fantasy, and are looking for an escape, this is a pleasant read.
