A wonderful deep dive into the long, creative life of Tove Jansson, the Finnish-Swedish artist behind the Moomintrolls. Tove was also a painter, a cartoonist, involved in theater, sculpture, and a writer of several prose novels and short story collections. She was born during the period of WW1 and WW2 overshadowed her twenties and early thirties, but she spent those years drawing cutting political cartoons against fascism and violence, as well as developing her gallery career, setting up her first studio, and falling in and out of several impactful love affairs. She seems to have accepted her own queerness or bisexuality without much internal struggle and lived as openly as was possible as the time. She turned down several proposals of marriage but happily in mid-life met an artist who became her life-long partner and sometime inspiration and collaborator. The two of them built a little cabin on a very small and barren island in the Finnish archipelago and spent summers there for nearly thirty years- partly to avoid the fame Tove received because of the global love of the Moomins. This book was translated and I do think at times it wander a bit or retreads some material, but I loved how rich it was in color illustrations. Always a pleasure to read about an artist's path.