Thimble Summer

A long drought breaks on the Linden family's Wisconsin farm the same day nine year old Garnet finds a small silver thimble in the dried bed of the creek near their house, and the rain that follows almost immediately convinces Garnet, and eventually the reader along with her, that the thimble carries some kind of luck through the rest of that summer. Enright builds the book from a loose sequence of small, connected adventures rather than one driving plot: Garnet and her friend Citronella get accidentally locked inside the town library overnight, her family's new barn goes up after money problems resolve themselves in the thimble's wake, her pig wins a blue ribbon at the county fair, and a boy named Eric, taken in by the family partway through the summer, becomes something like a new brother by its end. One especially tense chapter strands Garnet on a stalled Ferris wheel at the fair for nearly an hour, a frightening ordinary danger rather than anything supernatural, handled with the same warm, unhurried attention Enright gives every other event in the book. By summer's end Garnet has decided, on her own terms, that the thimble really was magic, less because anything strictly proves it than because the summer it accompanied turned out to be the best one she can remember.

Enright, who both wrote and illustrated the book, her second published book after Kintu: A Congo Adventure in 1935, gives the whole thing an easy, sun warmed pace that matches its Depression era farm setting without dwelling on the era's real hardship any more than a nine year old living through it might notice. It reads quickly and gently, closer to a string of remembered summer afternoons than to a story built around suspense, and its appeal rests almost entirely on that unhurried warmth rather than on any dramatic turn.