Summer's Lease: Summer Days and Nights by Wong Herbert Yee

What is so rare" as a summer's day?

Here is a summer day (and night) as seen through the senses of a young child, whose bare feet carry her after a butterfly and whose ears lead her to investigate a buzz, whose eyes are surprised and delighted to see a big, fuzzy, yellow and black bumblebee hovering by the pond.

In the halcyon world of Wong Herbert Yee's latest in a youngster's outdoor adventures, Summer Days and Nights (Henry Holt, 2012), a little girl strolls barefoot through a daisy-bedecked meadow, taking in the sights, sounds, and smells of a summer morning. She sits beneath a shady tree to sip her lemonade, and then she's ready for a different experience.

WHAT ELSE IS THERE TO KEEP ME COOL?
KERSPLASH! I JUMP INTO THE POOL!

After a splash in the wading pool, parents beckon the child to another summer delight, a picnic by the playground in the park.

A GOLDEN SUN SINKS IN THE SKY.
ANOTHER SUMMER DAY GONE BY.

But when darkness comes and it's too warm to fall asleep right away, the summer night is still calling her outside. A field mouse rustles below her window, and a hooting barn owl and barrumping bullfrog call her to a concert.

SUMMER NIGHT, MOONLIGHT SKIES,
WINGING, BLINKING FIREFLIES.

And when this happy little girl finally closes her eyes to "dream of summer days and nights," we realize that such a time of childhood is itself a dreamlike experience. Yee's simple rhyming couplets and soft-focus colored pencil illustrations on watercolor papers give this charming little tone poem of a book a dreamlike look and mood of its own, which reminds the adult reader that early childhood, like summer, "hath all to short a date."

"Small in scale but large-hearted in scope. . . Yee uses a free-associative first-person narrative to capture, beautifully, the meandering, quotidian episodes of a child's day outdoors," says The New York Times.

Yee's other books in this seasonal series are Who Likes Rain? and Tracks in the Snow. (read my review here)

No More Snoresville! Judy Moody and the Not Bummer Summer by Megan MCDonald

L.D.O.S.! LAST DAY OF SCHOOL!

SHE, JUDY MOODY, WAS GOING TO HAVE THE BEST SUMMER EVER!

RARE!

Judy Moody thinks it's time to take charge of her destiny! No more letting whatever happens happen--a strategy which so far has given her a bunch of bummer summers!

Judy charts out a summer of thrills and challenges for herself and her friends, Rocky, Frank, Amy and, whether she likes it or not, brother Stink. Then she calls a plenary session of the T.P. (Toad Pee) Club (initiation requirements: hold their pet toad until, er, nature takes its course) to lay out the PLAN, which she titles JUDY MOODY'S MEGA-RARE NOT BUMMER SUMMER DARE!

Judy proposes a competition, complete with a point system, to rate the summer daredevils and together they draw up a summer of dares--tightrope walking, mega-roller coaster riding, Bigfoot snaring. Everyone takes up their teacher Mr. Todd's challenge to sleuth out his summer job. Judy even asks her club to dare her to catch poison ivy.

And then the Not-Bummer Summer hits a snag. Mom and Dad are going to have to go away to look after Nana and her broken leg, and their seldom-seen Aunt Opal (Aunt Awful), who is between assignments as a guerrilla artist, volunteers to stand in. Then Rocky and Amy turn out to have better offers--Rocky to attend a circus camp and Amy to do anthropology with her mom in Borneo. and Judy's season of thrills indeed looks like another bummer summer!

Megan McDonald's movie tie-in novel, Judy Moody and the Not Bummer Summer (Judy Moody Movie Tie-In) (Candlewick, 2011), is a full-fledged Judy Moody sequel, with our moody, quirky heroine managing to have a super summer after all, with ice-cream truck chases, midnight cemetery creeping crawling, and all-night Bigfoot stakeouts, with Aunt Opal on board with the whole thing and even designing a little midnight guerrilla art sortie on her own. With or without the summer movie, this newest in the best-selling Judy Moody series will provide some non-bummer summer reading for the early elementary set.

A quick preview of the movie can be seen here.