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Achingly beautiful, a book that builds from a gentle start, pooling silently like sunlight as the story takes hold, gradually revealing a radiating luminosity that made this reader, upon reaching the final page, long to begin the story all over again.

Drenched with nostalgia that sets a tone that will send any reader back, (far back, in some cases) to the early days of teenage love, freedom, rebellion, and hope — thoughts and feelings not understood, but firmly in control, wherever they may lead, — and some of them unexpected, like “windows into a fresh elegant, big-city world”.

Friedrich Buchner is sixteen years old, somewhat ineffectually managing school and even relationships — with the exception of those he holds with his best friend Johann, and his free-spirited sister, Alma. With a head that is filled with “stories and pictures and ideas and dreams”, Friedrich is slated to spend his summer holidays with his much-adored Nana and his sternly exacting Grandfather, studying to recover from a disastrous school year and looming exam re-sits.

How Friedrich actually ends up spending his summer holidays — “the irretrievable, tremblingly beautiful magic of first times“ — is the stuff that rapturous stories are made of, ever so slowly drawing one into a spell that for this reader, couldn’t help but tug at heartstrings.

Living wildly, both the “greatest joy and the greatest disaster”, (no spoilers here), it’s not long before Friedrich is left to wonder:
“Why couldn’t beautiful things just stay beautiful? Completely, totally, absolutely beautiful”

A read that must be savoured, this is a telling of dreams, both lost and to be discovered, and the indescribably-primal pull of family, — all of it, leading to one grand summer, filled with, perhaps above all else, youth and yearning. And wonder.