Like the books featuring her beloved Moomins, the nature journal Notes from an Island by Tove Jansson moves fluidly between modes, alternating between tones of detached humor and earnest poignancy. This beautiful volume represents the most transparent collaboration between Jansson (The Summer Book; The Woman Who Borrowed Memories) and her partner in life and art, Tuulikki Pietilä (known as Tooti). Pietilä's paintings provide visual coherence to an otherwise fragmented but never jumbled recollection of the two women's 30 summers together on Klovharun, an island in the Gulf of Finland.
An introduction from Alexander Chee notes the draw of this island life, but it is Jansson who explains it best, the way visitors would come and "sometimes they brought a friend and sometimes the loss of a friend and they talked and talked about their yearning for the simple, the primitive and, most of all, their longing for solitude." Jansson, however, did not merely talk about it; she and Pietilä lived it, and Notes from an Island provides what Chee calls "something like a map as to how to live like Tove and Tooti did." --Sara Beth West, freelance reviewer and librarian