Michael Chabon's new book "Summerland" is a delightful read for adults, but whether kids will like it is hard to say. Chabon, currently best known for the Pulitzer-winning "Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay," but shortly to be "The guy who scripted Spiderman 2," crafts a tale of subtlety and delayed triumph, which are hardly qualities I recall celebrating in my pre-adolescence. Indicative of the problem is that the plot revolves around baseball, that most metaphor-laden of sports. There may have been a time when playing baseball (or rejecting it, as our hero Ethan Feld begins the book) engaged kids with society, history, and the standing-wave of innocence and competition that is the years between infancy and adolescence, but surely those times have passed?

As an adult reader, of course, the fact that the plot involves a sport that one may not care for is irrelevant. We understand that passages like "From the very first pitch the Liars appeared, as the announcers on television like to say, to have 'solved' her. The Man with the Knife in His Boot led off with a slap double, stole second, took off running on a solid single by the Man with the Pole, and scored on the very next pitch" are about the predicament and not the play-by-play. Similarly, the adult reader has empathy with the hero's repeated crises of faith (saving the universe is a heavy burden) but will kids choose to stick with a boy who chickens out for 300 pages before triumphing?

Unfortunately for my own enjoyment, while reading "Summerland" I happened across a critique of Restoration Hardware and I was afterwards plagued with the feeling that, as with Restoration Hardware, what I had was not a quirky original but just the end-product of an elaborate targetting of the Bohemian Bourgeois demographic. I know this is unfair to Chabon, who is a generous and gifted writer, but there you have it. Such cynical musings are, perhaps, the sort of thing for which "Summerland" is intended to be a tonic.