Review of the Day: Summer by Ali Smith

Spring is the fourth and final book in Smith’s remarkable seasonal quartet. I think you could read the books in any order. 

The rest of this review will just be some lines I noted while reading.

Heart emoji. Kiss emoji. Kiss emoji. Boxing glove emoji. POW emoji. Knight in shining armour emoji. Muscly arm emoji. Heart emoji. Heart emoji. There is no emoji she can think of that’s an anti-racist emoji. There are probably loads of racist emojis, and nothing obvious to send someone who’s been racistly done over. Why is that? (p. 40).

In here? It’s like. Hm. Imagine hand-painted animation at the cinema. Imagine a team of assiduous (she was pleased to have found a use for the word assiduous, her first time, she hoped she’d said it correctly, so she said it again just for the pleasure) assiduous girl painters sitting at a tinting table in a film factory. And they spend their day colouring by hand, dipping their brushes into pots of paints filled with the colours of blooming English roses, pinks and yellows shining like after a rainshower, then colouring each of the little triangles that’s about to do a dance across my eyes. And each time the frame changes, these colours, and the line of blackness that holds them together, like a road they’re all walking along, vibrate as if electricity is going through not just them but the road they’re on (p. 206).

But when she’d gone to bed she couldn’t get the thought of that piece of stone out of her head. Well, that’s what art is, maybe. Something that impresses mysteriously on you and you don’t know why (p. 274).

Art lower case a, she says, is, is, it’s uh about the moment you’re met by and so changed by something you encounter that it uh takes you both into and beyond yourself, gives you back your senses. It’s a, a shock that brings us back to ourselves…. Well, she says, well. Well, art lower case a always was about our getting to grips with concepts like mortality, and randomness (p. 329).

kindle and Audible audiobook. 385 pgs. 20 March 2026