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Samurai Summer Ake Edwardson Per Carlsson Books

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Samurai Summer Ake Edwardson Per Carlsson Books

I thought it was a little long, but the fantasy life of a disadvantaged young person at a government-run summer camp became more interesting as the tale wound out.


Tags : Amazon.com: Samurai Summer (9781477816547): Ake Edwardson, Per Carlsson: Books,Ake Edwardson, Per Carlsson,Samurai Summer,Skyscape,1477816542,Action & Adventure - General,Action & Adventure - Survival Stories,Camps,Fiction,Friendship,Juvenile Fiction,Problem youth,Social Issues - Friendship,Social Issues - Physical & Emotional Abuse,Juvenile Fiction - Action & Adventure - General,Juvenile Fiction - Action & Adventure - Survival Stories,Juvenile Fiction - Social Issues - Physical & Emotional Abuse

Samurai Summer Ake Edwardson Per Carlsson Books Reviews

Samurai Summer is a book that has big ideas yet somehow comes across as being a bit cold and too shortsighted to make the story stick. Characters that should have been believable somehow weren't and the book left me somewhat disaffected. I think the author was trying for the same dark tone as Let The Right One In but just didn't have a compelling enough story to make it work.

At a Summer camp in the 1960s, Tommy is once again dealing with the terrible reality of what he goes through every year. There is the mean camp owner, her 'son with serious issues', and a cast of very downtrodden low income family campers. Tommy is a bit of loner, a deeply flawed and somewhat broken boy, who deals with life by trying to live up to Samurai ideals. When one of his friends goes missing, Tommy will use those values to try to save her.

Tommy was a tough nut to crack. On the one hand, his dogged determination to live by the Samurai code made him somewhat of an unlikeable and tragically pathetic type of character. But as the story progresses and we learn his history, the fantasy world he has created around himself makes sense. I only wish it made him more interesting and intriguing.

Ironically, while the premise makes this sounds like it has a supernatural twist, the only fantastical elements in the book are Tommy's Samurai slavishness. The reality of the campers' situation is clearly dark and each of the kids at the low cost camp are there to be 'gotten rid of' by the parents. Where you have parents that don't care, the kids too often end up as victims.

I wish the book had made more of an impression on me but honestly by the time it finished, I was rather relieved and quickly forgot it. I was never engaged by Tommy or the other characters as I should have been; their tragic histories should have made them far more complex. But everyone at the camp just felt like sheep going to the slaughter while bleating occasionally.

I listened to the Audible version of the book and found the narration to be decent.
Tommy, who has renamed himself Kenny ('ken" means sword) is spending the summer at a camp for kids with not-too-well-off families, which apparently is a bonus in the eyes of the staff as it keeps them from visiting more than once a summer. A keenly imaginative Swedish boy on the cusp of adolescence in 1961, whose mother is at a "rest home," he deals with the tedium of the routine and the sadistic matron by weaving a world in which he is training to become a samurai, and he enlists his friends to build a secret castle in the woods. Tommy is also highly independent and behaves as if it is solely up to him to handle his problems, which is reasonable when you learn about his mother. To his surprise, he finds that he's also becoming interested in a spunky girl, Kerstin, who wants to see the castle, too. Though Tommy deals with a bullying campmate and his gang, he is unaware of a more serious threat the matron's son, Christian who has a habit of sneaking around at night and spying on the girls. Tommy's issues with the camp which begin with the relatively mundane theft of a bag of candy that was his, and his worries about his mother are eventually eclipsed when Christian does something that results in the campers literally fighting to stay alive.

The hero is easy to like and root for in his struggle to prevail against an unfair adult world that goes from being harsh to downright abusive over the course of his stay at camp. My only issue was that it took an awfully long time for the plot to get going. I thought it could have been tighter paced. However, the book has an important message about the importance of friendship and the power of imagination to triumph against adversity.
Per Carlsson's translation of Ake Edwardson's text is capable enough. He makes the book readable but I don't know if I missed something in translation or if it's just missing from the text because there is a distinct lack of a clear setting until fairly late in the book. Part of the confusion off the top is that Kenny, the narrator, is really into the way of the Samurai and wants to be one, but he lives in Sweden and goes to a summer camp. It's not exactly clear why he is there and there is a lack of development in backstory on most accounts. However, by the middle when you start to get a better sense of what Kenny and his crew are all about and the various things that are wrong with the running of the camp, the story is easier to follow.

This is more of an atmospheric than plot driven story. I don't know what it is about books by Scandinavian authors, but they are often rife with an atmosphere that pervades the writing and the story. Samurai Summer is one of these. Kenny's world is generally dark and a little menacing which is aided by the little there is of plot and character development.

Despite the limited point of view (Kenny's) and lack of character dynamism, this is an intriguing if not overly interesting subtle coming of age tale. Kenny does grow, if only a bit, but he does come into his own as he learns how to deal with the grownups in the story. A lot is unresolved which will likely frustrate readers who love nice bows at the end of their stories, but worth checking out if you like darker stories and don't mind a lack of action.
Love period pieces. Love attention to detail. I understand trying to save money by keeping outdoor scenes to a minimum...
this, to me, is too dark unnecessarily.
The hair is light tangle free, real easy to manage. The hair is however too thin.
This was a great book for kids but a bit simplistic for adults. Kids will enjoy the sense of power over adults
A boy from a poor family is sent to a camp for disadvantage children and he is fascinated by Samurais. He leads his friends to behave and act as a Samurai and the code of honor of samurais leads them to act in the moral compass of Samurais
I thought it was a little long, but the fantasy life of a disadvantaged young person at a government-run summer camp became more interesting as the tale wound out.