By Lynn Manuel, with illustrations by Kasia Charko. Orca Book Publishers, 29 pp, $19.95

When the clipper ship Marco Polo runs aground near Cavendish, Prince Edward Island, it changes the lives of not just sailors and beachcombers, but future author Lucy Maud Montgomery as well. Only eight, she's years away from writing Anne of Green Gables, but Montgomery is already a lover of big words and made-up tales ("I have always loved to spin stories") so she's naturally drawn to her family's exotic houseguest, the Marco Polo's Captain Bull.

Summer evokes 1883 with beautiful, detailed watercolours and an authentic tone of a fiery inner world hemmed in by the strictures of the period. (The story is based on Montgomery's diaries.) Every page points to the similarities and differences between her age and ours, and as both discussion starter and insight into the creator of the irrepressible Anne, The Summer of the Marco Polo is a lovely and worthwhile book. Suggested ages: six and up.