Junior, you are a born storyteller!
These teacher—written words of praise ring loud in the mind of Don Gutteridge's book—loving, eleven—year—old male protagonist Billy as he bolts from school on the last day of class. So the novel Summer's Idyll begins on Thursday, June 29th, 1944 set in a fictional Ontario lakeside town as seen through the eyes of the child of an absent father, a soldier fighting the Nazies somewhere in Europe. This 'what did you do on your summer vacation' bildungsroman begins only twenty—three days after the allies stormed the beaches of Normandy, and so the reader knows that each headline, every newspaper story, every scrap of information might bring the terrible black—bannered news of death of someone's father, someone's brother, someone's husband.
Set against this backdrop of distant war brought close to home, we experience the childhood adventures of an imaginative narrator rendered in the lyrical prose of a master.
Don Gutteridge, in addition to being an award—winning poet, is the author of twenty—two novels including the twelve—volume Marc Edward mystery series. Summer's Idyll may just be his greatest masterpiece. In the tradition of Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer, Emily of New Moon, Who Has Seen The Wind, we fortunate readers glory in the experiences of a precocious child pondering the big questions of life and death, the mysteries of sex and gender, all while playing and frolicking and being wonderfully alive during that time of great awakening in the cusp between late childhood and early adolescence.

Don Gutteridge is the author of more than forty books: poetry, fiction and scholarly works in educational theory and practice. He was born in Sarnia, Ontario, and raised in the nearby village of Point Edward. He graduated from Western University in 1960 with an Honours English degree, and taught high school English for seven years before moving to the Western Faculty of Education. He taught there for twenty—five years and is now Professor Emeritus. He lives in London, Ontario. In a review of his book The Way It Was, in The Western News, Kane Faucher said Gutteridge's poems have been "memorially 'lived in'" and "must negotiate a world with - and without - words…Both pleasant and haunting, we are treated to a world of velvet voices…in a memorial transfer from past to present, from present to beyond."

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