Possibly the most melancholy children's book ever written. While the Moomin stories all have a slightly unnerving, mysterious quality, but this one is outright existential.The idea is simple: What if there was a children's book where the main characters never showed up? Various supporting players from the other Moomin books converge on the Moomins' house, but they're just not there. Normally, this would lead to a quest story to find the family, but in his case, the Moomins are just away on a tri...

This was a strangely beautiful little book and a fitting end to the Moomins series.The Moomins are still off on their island, as seen in the previous book, and this book tells the tale of six members of their supporting cast, the 'B-listers' if you like, descending on the Moomins' house expecting them to be there as they normally would be and getting a bit of a shock. While they puzzle out where the Moomins have gone, they decide to prepare the house for the family's return. It's really sweet, a...

Here’s an offbeat selection for November. Strangely dark for a children’s book, it’s the last in the Moomins series. Tove Jansson said that after the Second World War she was depressed and wanted to write about something naïve and innocent. She wrote the first book of the Moomins series in 1945, about a family of hippo-like white trolls. The Moomins are well known and loved by many European children, but I suspect this book is more obscure and less lighthearted than the rest. Perhaps Jansson exp...

What a weird little book!This was my first visit to Moominvalley and apparently, I picked the wrong month . . . just like all of the characters in this book. They show up unannounced on the Moomin's doorstep, expecting solace and cheer, and instead they find emptiness and despair in a bleak, lonely house. The fact that the owners are gone doesn't stop the uninvited guests from making themselves at home, raiding the pantry and tracking mud into the house. And yet, life seems meaningless. They wan...

What a bittersweet feeling to read the last Moomin book! This was definitely melancholic and felt so weird to read, since the main characters are not even present. Not my favourite, but still, you know, it's Moomin!!

Such a melancholy children's book. But why not? Children are not happy all the time. I could definitely relate to this one around the age of 12, although when I re-read it as an adult, it made more sense.

"The Hemulen woke up slowly and recognised himself and wished he had been someone he didn't know."Nobody writes about sadness with as much clarity as Tove Jansson. This is the ninth Moomins book. Over the series, the tone has grown incrementally more melancholic. So it seems fitting that, for this final volume, the Moomin family do not appear. It ends with an absence.This is not an adventure like Comet in Moominland or Moominsummer Madness. It's the story of a disperate group of characters findi...

3.5 starsHaving read and loved the rest of the moomin books several times over several decades, I was reluctant to read this final book written by Tove after the loss of her mother.I don't think it's a spoiler to say the Moomin family do not appear in this book. Several friends come to their house and find them gone. A character called Toft, who is clearly based on the author herself feels this absence profoundly. Other characters miss the Moomin family and they tidy up the place and try to do s...

In the previous book, the patriarch has a midlife crisis and moves the family out to a deserted island to allow himself to feel useful again. It doesn't work out too well, but the family manages to reach some level of peace and understanding of their surroundings by the end. Logically, they should return to their idyllic valley to prepare for winter. But when the six characters of the final book arrive at their house, all dissatisfied and searching for one thing or another, the family is still m...

The quiet transition from autumn to winter is not a bad time at all. It's a time for protecting and securing things and for making sure you've got in as many supplies as you can. It's nice to gather together everything you possess as close to you as possible, to store up your warmth and your thoughts and burrow yourself into a deep hole inside, a core of safety where you can defend what is important and precious and your very own. Then the cold and the storms and the darkness can do their worst....

Last book of 2016 and last book on my other reading challenge (a book with the name of a month in the title)Moominvalley in November has a unique touch of sweet meloncholy, when you read it, you feel like missing a place you've never been.The moomin family isn't home, they went sailing. when few of their friends decided to pay them a visit, the valley and the house were empty, and all they were left with were their summer memories. As time (autumn) passes, they grew -somehow- attached to each ot...

The final two Moomin books sure feel like they were written more for adults than for kids. In this one, the Moomins are gone (away at the lighthouse), and everyone who shows up at their door for help instead has to figure out what to do about their own problems. It's heavy stuff, full of troubled characters, even with the usual light Moomin touch.My kid did not like the last two books and kept asking when we could re-read Finn Family Moomintroll instead. We raced through the first 5 and then gro...

This book so completely captures loss. Like everything Jansson writes, she reduces the plainest and most vital aspects of life to their component parts. Eloquent, mundane, and profound. It was delightful and it also broke my heart. "How can there be so many sounds in an empty house, Fillyjonk thought. Then she remembered that the house was full of people. But somehow she still thought it was empty."

Having just read a couple of nostalgia bombs, I am forced to admit the Moomins were not a part of my childhood. This, for a Finn, can be considered a deviation from culture and general education. I, of course, read the entirely wrong Moomin book here, as this is apparently the last one Jansson wrote and doesn't even feature the most well-known Moomin characters. It would also have been much more appropriate to read it in the late autumn as a sort of 'setting out the vibe' read. Regardless, I enj...

If you like your children books to be depressing and bleak you couldn't do much better than Moominvalley in November. Edward Tulane, might have had it's moments of despair, and had an overarching sadness to it, but next to this novel it's pretty fucking upbeat. If Ingmar Bergman ever directed a children's movie it would probably be like this. Six depressed and solitary people separately decide to visit this one family that has always made them feel like life is worth living. Instead of finding t...

A tender ode to the aura of autumn – drenched in reflective anticipations of the approaching hibernation and speckled with mysterious promises for new beginnings. Clever and wise.

So indeed, if you as a reader (and like I most definitely do) already think that the penultimate of Tove Jansson’s Moomin novels, that you consider Moominpappa at Sea to be rather annoyingly depressing, then the final novel of the series, then Jansson’s 1970 Sent i november (Moominvalley in November) where the Moomins friends and acquaintances all travel to Moominvalley for a visit only to find the house deserted and Moomintroll and his parents gone, could easily and likely feel even more so. Fo...

Moominvalley in November is the last book in The Moomins series and definitely one of my favourite books written by Tove Jansson. It is terribly underrated but I think it is easily the best in the Moomin series. It is a lot darker, harsh and mature as the nature is in November. I do think that it doesn't work well as a book for both adults and children as the other Moomin books do but I thoroughly enjoy the novel every time I reread it and would recommend to pick this up even if you have never r...

Sweet and melancholic book about creatures from the Moomin Valley trying to find their true selves. Never understood the Moomin magic as a child, and at least this one is really a book for adults, not children. Some deep stuff going on here. Listened to a beautiful reading by Tove Jansson herself. Listen here (in Swedish): https://areena.yle.fi/1-4195039?autop...

This is a wonderfully subtly book about the decay of Autumn and the change towards winter, about loneliness, fear, music, awkwardness, dementia, an old house, the wind at night, the darkness late in the year, the idea of the family, a sense of loss and waiting. A children's book written with the firm belief that children can accept all of these things.