The Summer of the Pike

To American kids—and adults, for that matter—living on a manor in the shadow of an ancient castle sounds impossibly romantic. But for the kids who inhabit this German novel, it's just life as usual. Until the summer of the pike, that is, when everything changes.

Anna is our first-person heroine, a girl of unspecified age whose best friends are Lucas and Daniel, the two boys of the other worker family who live on the manor. The story is set during the hottest summer on record, which the kids spend fishing in the moat surrounding the castle. Inside Daniel and Lucas's house something is happening that no one will talk about: Their mother is sick and getting sicker, losing her hair and covering her head with a bright bandana. The boys funnel all their emotion into fishing for little redeye and dreaming about the first day of pike season, when they can try to catch the big, silvery fish that comes to represent something magical to them.

At only 92 pages, this slender novel ends up touching on a few elemental topics: nature, family, God, and death (and, of course, its troublesome flip side, life). There's not enough time for deep character development, and the plot isn't full of dramatic twists—just one painful situation that casts its long shadow over everything the kids do. The result is a spare but pretty novel that reads more like a poem, or even a play, with fields of yellow mustard flowers and red poppies as a brightly painted backdrop.

The only bone to pick here is with the book's language, which I'm blaming on the translation since I haven't seen the original. The characters' occasionally awkward turns of phrase are not so much poorly rendered as they are sort of dorky, which, for younger readers, might take away from the novel's unsparing realism; likewise, the dialogue is fairly relentless with its exclamation points. But readers who can bear in mind that the book was originally written in another language will be able to get past these linguistic foibles, and perhaps even appreciate the change of perspective that another language—even in translation—can provide.

And some things, of course, are universals. For instance, since Gisela's cancer is seen from the kids' point of view, it's rarely actually seen at all. The adults refuse to talk about it with them for as long as they can get away with it, which compounds their fear rather than assuaging it. Anna experiences the unhappiness that comes from illness secondhand, in the waves that ripple off of it: through the ridiculous cruelty of the local gossips, and the shocking inability of the adults in her life to make things better.

To be sure, this book's strength is in its pull-no-punches honesty, and one of its few subtleties is an interesting one. It isn't expressly stated that one of the three rough-and-tumble kids on the manor is a girl until at least a quarter of the way through the story, and the effect is an ambiguity that's shoulder-shruggingly indifferent. They all climb trees during lightning storms, grasp the slimy redeye fish that they need for bait, and yell until they get the attention of the peacock and peahen, who warble back at them. Does it really matter who's a boy and who's a girl?

But of course it does matter, especially to Anna, who once overheard her mother complain that she'd always wanted a boy instead. Anna is sad and scared about what will happen to Gisela, and boyishly, perhaps, she expresses her chaotic feelings by getting angry. Ultimately she discovers that overcoming fear and treating people with kindness are things both men and women, like her mother and the boys' father, have to learn to do.

The little fish described in this book—their beauty, vulnerability and strength—are powerful metaphors for what the two families experience. Ironically, because of its unflinching, nature-inspired approach to illness and death, this book is likely to be a real comfort to readers who have had to cope with those things in their own lives. No one is too young to appreciate the beauty of the truth.