The title of this book is quite intriguing. You need to think about it both before and after reading this newest book by Danielle Binks. Before reading the title made me think was a Young Adult title - perhaps a first love story. And after reading this proved to be untrue. Also, the name choices are interesting. One is an abbreviated name and the other a full name. This could say Alytash and Leopold; or Tash and Leo. As for the six summers you need to read the beginning of the book carefully to understand this idea.
Tash's real name is Alytash Simons (a name I had no idea how to pronounce as I was reading) but she prefers to be called Tash. Leopold Zając has many names. His mum calls him Myszko which means mouse in Polish. His Uncle Alek calls him Lew which means lion also in Polish but in reality, he just wants everyone to call him Leo. Oh, and it would be great if everyone took the trouble to learn how to say his last name: Zye-onse.
Tash is unwell and has been in hospital for extended periods. She is sure her cancer will return, and she is terrified of this. This partly explains why, after years of friendship, she now seems to have rejected her friend Leo. She does not want to think about her life before or be reminded that she is 'the cancer girl'. Tash is staying home for now and homeschooling.
Leo has his own demons. Dad has had to move away to live with his own parents in Western Australia because his gambling addiction has nearly ruined their family. Leo misses him dreadfully.
As this story opens as Grade 6 is ending and so over the coming months Leo will start high school but instead of going to the local public comprehensive one, he has won a scholarship to the prestigious Como College. Leo is worried about leaving his only friend Rami and he is also dreading the long journey to reach this distant school each day. And he knows he has to live up to his mum's expectations. Then Leo discovers he simply cannot go to school. He is not deliberately avoiding high school but his anxiety is so acute he simply cannot attend. He can do his schoolwork at home but he simply cannot leave the house to catch the train.
At the end of Grade 6 a couple of significant things have happened. Leo experienced his first dreadful panic attack and to make matters worse this happened in front of all the Grade 6 kids at the end of year waterslide day. Tash has not spoken to him in over a year and then suddenly she wants his help to deliver a letter to a lady, Mrs Shepparson, who lives nearby.
Mrs Shepparson has her own terrible life issues to deal with. Her son died aged twelve in the storm water drain, she is suffering from acrophobia, and developers are harassing her wanting to buy her sweet little house which is full of memories and colours. The only company she has is her dog named Rosie. And those letters (there seem to be lots of them) are a mystery. Then tragedy strikes and it seems the developers are to blame. All these things need to come together. Leo and Tash need to get to know Mrs Shepparson; Leo and Tash need to heal their friendship; and the bullying by the developers of the new housing estate must be uncovered and stopped.
Danielle Binks creates a strong sense of place in her book although it is fairly Melbourne centric. Having visited a few Melbourne suburbs (I do not live there) I could, however, easily visualise the street, culvert and storm water drain which are the main focus of the story. I read that the real suburb is Noble Park in Melbourne.
Blurb: Alytash and Leopold - Tash and Leo - are neighbours who used to be best friends, but aren't anymore, for reasons that Leo doesn't entirely understand. But now it's the last week of Year Six and Tash is standing in Leo's front yard with a misdelivered letter - and a favour to ask. It's a request that will set off a chain of events in their little crescent in Noble Park, a suburb that is changing, and fast. As they solve an unfolding neighbourhood mystery and help Ms Shepparson, a reclusive neighbour with a tragic past, Tash and Leo each has to confront fault lines in their own recent histories and families. They will discover that friendships can grow and change, that bravery takes many forms, and that, most of all - whatever the future holds - friends and family are what matter.
I think readers aged 11+ either at the end of Primary school or in High School will enjoy Six Summers of Tash and Leopold. I do like the cover. My label for this book is Young Adult - I wonder if this book has been submitted for the CBCA Book of the Year Awards 2025 and if it has, I think it might be a notable title.
Here are a few text quotes:
"I think it's a pretty good test of a friendship, being apart for a while and coming back together again, seeing if it makes you feel more or less like yourself."
"The past can never be changed, but 'history' is ongoing - we try to understand what happened, and we find new evidence or new accounts that fill out our understanding and provide new context. Which means history is an ongoing conversation that we can always learn more about, but the past is a fixed point that's just kind of there waiting for us to dig up and better understand. "
"Everyone keeps telling me that the cancer isn't back, that I've been given the all clear,' she made bunny rabbit air quotes with her fingers, ' but all I can hear is yet."
"It's easy for historians - they look at the past like rewinding a movie, able to skip backwards and forwards seamlessly so that all the events line up and make sense, dominoes falling in place along the timeline. Uncertainty doesn't factor in once the story's been written, and it's easy to forget the people in the middle of all that history, who never knew whether or not things would work out in the end."
Reading reviews of Six Summers of Tash and Leopold I made some discoveries - things I might not have thought of:
1. It is essential to turn back to the beginning of this book and re read the letter Leo writes to Tash, which is how the book begins and yes, it is how the book ends too.
2. The publisher has likened this book to Bridge to Terabithia and I thought oh no surely not but - well you need to discover why this is actually one book you could connect with Six Summers of Tash and Leopold.
Read this extensive interview with Paperbark Words and Joy Lawn.
Review quotes:
I do, however, need to do a little nit picking about this book. I really did not understand why the Primary School Teacher-Librarian was a non-binary person with the courtesy title Mx Chambers. I'm always happy find a kind, sympathetic, and in this case, wise teacher-librarian in any story or school library, but I found this character label inclusion a little contrived. I did do some research because this term was new to me, in fact at first I thought it was a typo, and here is what I discovered: Mx. is a title that indicates neither marital status nor gender. The Reading Time reviewer agrees with me about this small point.
Speaking of typos - sorry I did warn you I was going to be a bit picky - if you have this book in your hands turn to page 225. I feel there might be a word missing from this sentence. It is not crucial to the plot but it confused me:
"At that, I threw my arms around Tash - pinning her own in place if only so I could help warm them - and I felt her turn her head and rest her cheek atop my head."
Is this meant to say pinning her arms in place? or pinning her hands in place? We have read in the previous section that it is winter, and they are both quite cold.
One more problem - sorry again. Leo and his former friend Rami are library monitors, or as they are called in this book Library Leaders. Clearly Danielle Binks does appreciate libraries. The Primary school library sounds terrific in contrast with the non-staffed, high tech, impersonal, and 'all for show' posh high school library. Early in the book Leo quotes his mum who quotes Professor R David Lankes -
"Bad libraries build collections, good libraries build services, great libraries build communities."
I watched this video by Danielle Binks from her Instagram page and I know she deeply appreciates school libraries but there is a small error in her story (well it feels like an error to me). Some libraries use little paper slips to record the date a book is due back - this was certainly a standard library procedure in the past. The little slips are called date due slips, not catalogue cards. As a teacher-librarian this sentence gave me a bit of a jolt (sorry I know this is so trivial). You can see examples below.
"Over the break I received a letter in the mail ... from Librarian Chambers. I guess they meant to give it to me at graduation, but then I didn't go. It was an old-school library catalogue card - the ones that used to be taped into the back of library books to show how many times a title had been borrowed, before everything got digitised."
