Poppy’s lakeside summers are full of the fun of youthful yesteryears: swimming and tubing, picking berries and catching minnows, toasting marshmallows and watching thunderstorms roll across the water. The greatest pleasure, however, is in sharing family traditions that have been built over generations and imagining the childhoods of parents and grandparents spent in the same ways at the same cottage.
Kristyn Jewell’s POPPY & PA is a simple but joyous celebration of summertime as a kid. Structured loosely as a full day of activity, POPPY & PA glides from one moment to the next on smooth, rhythmically satisfying prose. Phrases like “my spirit as light as the breeze off the lake” bounce off the reader’s tongue. Others, like “the lonely call of the loon” or “this coniferous cathedral,” add a little spice with gentle alliteration and a few vocabulary words for early and intermediate readers. The story itself is straightforward, but it’s packed with tactile detail; it’s hard to come away without craving a snack, like “tiny, wild Ontario blueberries […] picked earlier that day.”
Part of POPPY & PA’s unique character comes from the family’s Scandinavian roots. Breakfast includes toast with not only butter or honey, but also “our favourite aged cheese;” the family enjoys summer foods like barbeque and grilled corn, but also “spiced gingerbread cookies, pepparkakor.” This light dusting of Swedish flavor is enhanced by the excellent illustrations of Chelsea Peters. The art is round, soft, and layered like watercolors—especially in the representations of flora. Its play against the white of the page simultaneously evokes Scandinavian folk art, as might be embroidered onto a textile edge or painted on the plaster of a cottage wall. This gives Poppy’s family just the right balance of humanizing specificity and universality.
POPPY & PA already feels a little old-fashioned. At least to an American audience, the thought of “friluftsliv” (the Scandinavian concept for going outdoors) may appeal more to grown-ups than kids. But POPPY & PA presents a beautiful opportunity to engage young readers with the wonders of nature and inculcate the enthusiasm for friluftsliv in a new generation.
Kristyn Jewell’s POPPY & PA is a love letter to childhood summers with fluid prose, sparkling illustrations by Chelsea Peters, and plain-hearted affection for family and nature.
~Dan Accardi for IndieReader