Mark Dennis (3)

In the Acknowledgments of Song For A Summer Night, author Mark Dennis credits philosophers and writers Sohren Kierkegaard, Sun Tzu, Friedrich Nietzsche and James Joyce for inspiration, “all of whom I quoted or paraphrased liberally with the hope and understanding that certain people would recognize and appreciate their application.” However, after spending a few pleasant hours reading this book (on a hot summer evening) the impressions of this reviewer tended toward authors like Kenneth Grahame, A.A. Miline, Lewis Carroll, and even Thorne Smith. Song For A Summer Night is a young teen’s book in the classic tradition where a boy -- in this case twelve-year-old Peter Phye -- on the verge of manhood, or at least what most civilized cultures now call adolescence, is granted the power to converse with animals and nature for a short time and embarks upon a difficult and sometimes dangerous quest. In this story, Peter Phye’s mission for the Queen Of The Night is to bring back the songs of nature which have mysteriously disappeared. The setting is also classic, a rural, or at least still mostly wild suburban, environment of shadowy woods, sunny meadows, leafy glades, a pond, a graveyard, and a field with an old abandoned car, all vividly described; the heat of August afternoons, the coolness of mornings and late at night, the clinging damp of a sweaty T-shirt, the rasp of stickers (or “pickers”) on bare arms and legs, the sting and itch of mosquito bites, and the razor-like rake of cat claws. There are villains and friends, human, animal, insect and supernatural; hip-hop blue jays, a gangster raccoon, and devious, drunken bugaboos. Peter has real-world problems, too; an alcoholic mother and a workaholic dad. He also feels the impending ordeal of adolescence... caught hugging his pillow one night. As with most really good books for kids, Song For A Summer Night will also appeal to adults who haven’t forgotten the trials, fears, both real and imaginary, and the simple pleasures of being a kid and living in the moment. While some (usually self-proclaimed) experts on young-adult literature, or “what kids want to read,” will probably question whether a book such as this will interest many of today’s cynical, channel-surfing, cyber-texting, vid-gaming, byte-ridden, TV-zombified, and often self-drugged youth, this reviewer -- at Peter Phye’s age, a chubby, beer-chugging boy who worked in his father’s scrap-metal yard -- came up in grimy West Oakland, California during the violent Vietnam War era of riots, police brutality, Black Panthers and “God Is Dead” (Rosemary’s Baby) yet still remembers how his school librarian’s weary face actually lit up as if there was still hope for the world when asked about a book called The Wind In The Willows. And, even in a mind-killing urban jungle of brick, concrete, trash and rust, there are always places a boy can find -- assuming he wants to -- the shade beneath a rotting wharf, a bay shore field of jumbled junk, where, with a few cans of Coke and bag of chips, he might still experience a little of nature in the lapping of waves on mossy pilings, the whisper of breeze through dry yellow weeds, and the warmth of the sun on his shirtless chest; not so different from Water Rat on his riverbank, Christopher Robin in the Three-Acre Wood, Alice in the meadow by the rabbit hole... or Peter Phye in his rural woodlands. Such a boy might even imagine having Thorne Smithian Lazy Bear Lane convoluted conversations with animals and supposedly nonexistent beings. The choice, after all, now as was then, is his own.… (más)