Review: The Summer Prince by Alaya Dawn Johnson
A heart-stopping story of love, death, technology, and art set amid the tropics of a futuristic Brazil.
The lush city of Palmares Tres shimmers with tech and tradition, with screaming gossip casters and practiced politicians. In the midst of this vibrant metropolis, June Costa creates art that’s sure to make her legendary. But her dreams of fame become something more when she meets Enki, the bold new Summer King. The whole city falls in love with him (including June’s best friend, Gil). But June sees more to Enki than amber eyes and a lethal samba. She sees a fellow artist.
Together, June and Enki will stage explosive, dramatic projects that Palmares Tres will never forget. They will add fuel to a growing rebellion against the government’s strict limits on new tech. And June will fall deeply, unfortunately in love with Enki. Because like all Summer Kings before him, Enki is destined to die.
Pulsing with the beat of futuristic Brazil, burning with the passions of its characters, and overflowing with ideas, this fiery novel will leave you eager for more from Alaya Dawn Johnson.
The Summer Prince is an important new book in YA. Alaya Dawn Johnson presents a fascinating future society, unlike any other I’ve read. Rather than raising questions about the possibility of an all-powerful political regime, it looks into the social and cultural aspects of the potential future. It was an Earth-shaking novel for me, and I believe it will be for many others.
The story starts with the election for the Summer King, an event that takes place every five years. The Summer King is a politician who is more a figurehead and sex god than someone with any power. He serves one vital purpose, however: At the end of his year-long term, whoever is elected will be sacrificed in a ritual in which he chooses the next queen. During his short reign, he is showered with love and adoration, and given access to anything he could want. Enki, the contestant who is elected, is from the poorest class. He gives the Queen and “Aunties” (who are the other women in power) a little more than they bargained for: far from being just a sex god, he is an artist pushing against all the boundaries of what the Summer King should be, driven by the injustices the lower classes face.
The Summer Prince by Alaya Dawn Johsnon, GayYA’s September Book of the Month
A little ways in, you find out June has been chosen as one of the contestants in the competition for the Queen’s Choice Award, the most prestigious award available to people her age, granting whoever wins it renown in the city, and a free-ride to the most acclaimed art school. June, driven by her passion for her art, and her belief in the messages she includes in it, sees that Enki is of a similar make. She cleverly sets up a meeting with the man the whole city is salivating over, and they start a collaboration on a project that is sure to secure her the award.
The city of Palmares Tres is built as a giant pyramid, with the highest classes living at the top. The people in the poorest class live at the very bottom of the structure, where there is a perpetual stink coming from the algae vats that power the city, and they have very little access to the things the rest of the city has been granted. They have been forced to master illegal technology: The city, being automated, has biases against lower-class citizens literally installed into it. As June and Enki grow closer, June starts to see this ugly side of the city she so loves, which had previously been hidden from her by her privilege. The lower-class people, fed up with this treatment and emboldened by seeing one of their own in a position of power, begin pushing for more access. Others join the struggle for fewer regulations on the “mods” allowed into the city. The Queen and Aunties, are steadfast against moving their regulations. Eventually, this friction reaches a tipping point and protests break out, which become accidentally violent. Enki and June’s art projects have unintentionally elevated them as the icons of this revolution, which puts them both in a dangerous and incredibly powerful position.
June was an amazing protagonist. Pretentious, in possession of complete sexual freedom, passionate, and artistic, she was an unusual female protagonist, and I loved watching her deal with different things in her life. The other characters were well-formed too. ENKI. I loved Enki with all of my heart (I swear to god, whoever wrote the blurb isn’t joking about the fact that everyone falls in love with him). Gil, June’s best friend, was fabulous. Even the minor ones caught my attention, and I wish we could’ve seen more of them. I especially wanted June to develop a closer friendship with another female, but, alas. She did have a wonderfully complex relationship with her mother, which I enjoyed seeing.
Johnson defines her book as more of a work of science fiction than a dystopia, and I think that fits. Most dystopia is formed by an all-controlling political regime, and while The Summer Prince has a corrupted political system, it does not go to the extremity that dystopias do. Johnson instead delves completely into all aspects of the future, the new but very familiar conflicts of young vs. old (and how this changes in a world where lifespans are up to 200 or more years), those for and against technology, and the things that arise from living in a matriarchal society. I loved Johnson’s vision of art in the future, how it may evolve as more advanced technology comes along. I find the exploration of that so important, because as teens grow up, we face more and more scorn for the technology we use. It seems adults see only our faces turned down at our screens— but they have no context to grasp the enormity of what we may be doing, the things we can create that they couldn’t dream of (and sometimes still can’t!). To be sure, there are things to be lost as technology comes in, but art is not one of them. As much as this book delved into other things, however, it did have enough dystopian aspects to it that it sort of felt like the dystopia I’d been waiting to read— It wasn’t in the US, contact with other countries was a thing, all of the characters were people of color, and the world had evolved to a place where there was no longer an assumed sexual orientation. There is sort of a love triangle, but polyamory is so accepted that it’s almost not even a thing.
Although I loved the world Johnson created, I do have a few critiques of it. While I liked that it was set in a matriarchy, I disliked the fact that this meant there was still a large emphasis on the gender binary. I also would have loved to see, like, an asexual character or a transgender one. Although Enki makes a good point about how the matriarchy oppresses men, I have to think it would affect non-binary and trans people just as negatively. And although the sexual freedom of this world was fabulous to see in a YA, I think it would’ve been cool to see how asexual people dealt with it. I have also seen critiques of the representation of Brazilian culture, which I recommend to anyone planning to read this.
As I made my way through The Summer Prince, I found myself alternatively whizzing and crawling through the pages. It was all good, but at times there was too much of the good. Though only 289 pages, I felt at times that I was making my way through a book twice its size. It read a bit like an epic classic. The language was rich, the world well-structured, and it was teeming with the truths of humanity. I heard a quote recently that was something like: “the purpose of art is to take something unfathomable and present it simply.” That’s exactly what Johnson does every single page of The Summer Prince.
The story wasn’t exactly plot-driven, so the last quarter came as a surprise– it was not where I saw the book going at all, and instead of it being a nice break from predictability, I felt like I’d just suffered a case of whiplash. But the ending made up for it all, and I am so glad I stuck with it.
I think it’s a book older teens and adults will enjoy, and I hope that everyone will be exposed to it: It’s truly groundbreaking. I can’t speak for adult fiction, but I’ve never seen anything like it in YA. I seriously cannot cram everything I love about into this tiny little review. I could write a 20 page analysis and still not cover everything that is incredible and mind-boggling about it. Just— go out and read it, and love it, and then make all your friends read it, and then come back and freak out with me with me over how good it was.
Or, yanno, you could enter our Giveaway of THE SUMMER PRINCE 
(open to US residents only).
We’ll be interviewing Alaya Dawn Johnson on Friday– if you have something you’d like us to ask her, tweet it to us at @thegayya!
–
Review written by Vee Signorelli, co-admin of GayYA.org.
Girl Sex 101
Editor’s Note: There are NSFW text and images in this post.
How did you learn about sex?
From health class? Your parents? Your first time? Porn?
It’s hard to learn about sex at all, even harder if you’re on the LGBTQ spectrum.
For that reason, many of us have to seek out info on our own, leading us to the internet or that more experienced friend. Sometimes that works out well. Other times, not so much.
As a reader, I looked for books, finding a dark corner of the library where I could surreptitiously flip through pages. I didn’t find much worth the effort. It’s hard to learn about sex from a book. The concepts may be well explained, but sex is such a kinesthetic, emotional, and visual experience, there’s only so much words alone can get across.
And while our (often pathetic) classroom sex-ed covers plumbing, it rarely considers pleasure, identity, and emotional connection. In other words, understanding only plumbing decontextualizes sex. It’s like learning about pipes without understanding cooking, bathing, cleaning, drinking, and the many other reasons why humans need and enjoy water.
Likewise, if we learn only about anatomy and procreation, we aren’t equipped to understand why we may want or not want sex. Nor are we prepared to become sexual investigators, exploring what makes us feel good, how we like to be touched, and what makes us feel safe– all of which are required for good sex. And without safe ways to learn about these things without actually having to try them out, a lot of us go into our first sexual experience confused or scared.
I found the remedy to this problem in fiction. Through story, I could understand not only the “how” of sex, but the “why” and the “yippie!” and the “yikes!” 
When I felt connected to characters, I understood their emotional journeys, taking sex out of the realm of “this is how babies are made” and into “this is how communities are strengthened, love is born, and fears triggered.” Stories made me understand sex not just as an exercise, but as a force. Like money or art, sex is an exchange of energy. Fiction helped me understand the many ways of negotiating that energy, and how to make my own choices around it.
In my new book, Girl Sex 101, I wanted to offer two tracks of sex-ed: one fact-based, mechanics of bodies and how they process pleasure, specifically aimed at queer women, and one story-based exploration of how sex and friendship are interrelated. Each chapter of Girl Sex 101 opens with a story of two ex-girlfriends on a road trip from Vancouver to San Diego. Along the way they get into sexy adventures that test their friendship, push their boundaries, and expand their minds. I want to give readers an access point for understanding not just the mechanics of sex, but how sex can impact the rest of our lives. It is sex in context.
Too often in my sex-ed workshops, I meet people who insist that getting consent or asking for preferences is clunky or “inorganic.” This is because we don’t have any role modeling of hot, organic sexual conversation! I decided to show my characters having consent conversations, safer sex negotiations, and speaking up about their preferences so readers can see how it can be done well:
<<<< excerpt from Girl Sex 101:
Dixie traces a fingertip from Layla’s ear, along her neck and chest, to circle her nipple. “You mean you have a hard time asking for what you want?”
Layla shakes her head. “No, I mean, no one even usually asks. So I guess I don’t know the answer.”
Dixie leans in and kisses the path her finger traced, whispering into Layla’s clavicle, “Oh that’s easy. Lay back and relax. We’re going to play a game.”
Layla’s heart beats hard against her ribs. Dixie leans over her and strokes her face with light touch. Layla shivers.
“You like that?” Dixie asks.
Layla grins. “Is this the game?” Dixie glides her light fingered touch down Layla’s cheek to her neck and chest.
“How do you like your nipples played with?”
Layla shrugs and mumbles, “You know, the usual way.”
“Oh honey.” Dixie chuckles. “All the ways are the usual ways.” Dixie licks the tip of Layla’s nipple and says, “I’m going to gently bite your nipple. I want you to slowly count up from one, and as you do, I’m going to increase the pressure on your nipple. Stop counting when it stops feeling good, okay?”
Layla smiles. “One. . .” she says.
“Two . . .”
“Three. . . ” She sighs.
“Four. . . ” “Five . . .” She moans.
“Six— Yeowch!!”
Dixie relaxes and kisses Layla’s breast. “Six and a half then?” Dixie purrs. “I can work with that.”
<<<End excerpt>>>>>>
There is no shortage of sexual information on the internet, but there is a shortage of fact-based, judgment-free, body-positive, and queer-positive role-modeling. Girl Sex 101 will add one voice to the conversation. My videos and other sex-ed content add more. But to create a truly queer-centric and sex-positive movement, we need many diverse voices willing to speak up about what turns them on. This can mean posting videos or participating in online chats, or it can mean being willing to tell your partner what you want or don’t want. Or it can be educating your friends with honest, shame-free, sex ed.
I’m passionate about making the world safer and more nurturing for LGBTQIA people, and this means providing real information about sex, not just the mechanics, but the bodies, spirits, and minds of people.
Who will you help learn good information about sexuality? Whose life will you change by giving them permission to be curious and engaged? How will your story of your own sexual life help influence the choices of others a few steps behind on their own journeys?
Allison Moon is the author of Girl Sex 101 and the Tales of the Pack series of novels about lesbian werewolves. Both books in the series, Lunatic Fringe and Hungry Ghost, were nominated for Goldie Awards for lesbian fiction. Allison was a 2011 Lambda Literary Emerging LGBT Authors Fellow. Allison is also a sex educator who has presented her workshops– on strap-on sex, polyamory, sexual self-expression, erotica writing, and more– to thousands of people around the US and Canada.
Find Allison on Twitter @TheAllisonMoon and on Allison’s website: talesofthepack.com
Illustrations by Katie Diamond– Find Katie/kd at:
katiediamond.com
@thekddiamond
Keep up with Girl Sex 101 @girlsex101
Interview With Francesca Lia Block
Francesca Lia Block is the author of our August Book of the Month, Love in the Time of Global Warming! Hope you enjoy.
[Transcript to come.]
This is our first recorded interview– if you have comments or suggestions for us, tweet us @thegayya, or shoot me an email at victoria@gayya.org. (Our comments are STILL not working. Le sigh.)
Our September Book of the Month is The Summer Prince, by Alaya Dawn Johnson. Stay tuned for our interview with Alaya! If you have something you’d like us to ask her, hit us up on Twitter!
Minor Queer Characters in YA
The unfortunate truth is that most mainstream YA centres around a boy-girl romance with maybe a bit of magic or tragedy or dystopian violence thrown in. That’s it. There’s very little room on the Teen Fiction shelves at Barnes & Noble for books about girls who kiss girls or boys that kiss boys simply because – apparently – the readership isn’t quite “ready” for those themes yet.
Now, obviously, I understand that Barnes & Noble (and other bookshops) can’t physically make their shops any bigger just to please the fairly minuscule percentage of their readers that are a) readers of YA and b) either queer or interested in queer stories, but at least bookshop chains have managed to find a happy medium which has worked, I think, to the advantage of both writers and readers: minor queer characters in YA novels.
On blogs like this one, I find there’s often a lot of criticism about these secondary characters – how the writer only included them to tick diversity off their checklist, how publishers are claiming to be pro-equality because of them, how they’re built up from stereotypes. And it’s true that, especially a few years back, finding a gay boy in a book usually meant that he was the female protagonist’s BFF and that they went shopping together and gossiped about hot celebrities. Lesbian characters were rarer and I don’t think I ever came across a book with a minor trans character as part of the plotline. Since then, either the books I’ve been reading have changed or the publishing industry has got a grip on itself, and I suspect it’s probably a combination of the two that has led to some richly drawn minor characters that are full of depth and motivation.
Love Letters to the Dead by Ava Dellaira
In particular I want to talk about the book that prompted me to write this post: Love Letters to the Dead by Ava Dellaira. In terms of form (and to a lesser extent, tone) it reminded me of Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower, since it’s written as a collection of letters written by a high school freshmen. (Incidentally, Chbosky read drafts of the novel as it was being written). It’s about a girl who has just lost her older sister and is tentatively exploring feelings that vary from misery to love, and is definitely worth reading. However, my favourite part of the novel was the sort of “sideline” romance that I personally found more compelling than the primary romance, probably just because the characters were so well created and seemed extremely real. It was between two girls who become the protagonist’s close friends, and is full of humour and tragedy in its own way. For me, this just proves how successful secondary romances and characters can be if the writer takes care to treat them as real people as opposed to just an orientation to be included.
There are numerous other books that are just as successful in this respect, and that seems like a step forward: we’ve got to the stage, finally, where teenagers are expected to not really care if one of the people they’re reading about is queer, and that’s a great place to be. Yes, it’s hard to find these stories when you’re browsing bookshelves, simply because there’s no special label that says “I’M ABOUT GAY PEOPLE!” on the spine in neon green – but that’s not such a bad thing. Queer people fitting in and not being classed as “unusual” is exactly the way it should be in real life and it’s therefore a great achievement that this has already happened in our bookshops.
So maybe go out this weekend and buy a few YA novels to see what you can find. Yes, it’ll probably be six or seven books before you find anyone who isn’t straight and cis, but that’s okay. A couple of years and the industry will shift its paradigm once again. For now, they’re hidden gems: so when you find them, enjoy them.
Georgie is a teen writer and bookworm from England. At the moment she’s working on a gay YA novel of her own and can be found procrastinating on Twitter (@missgeorgie) or else ranting on her blog (georgiepenney.weebly.com).
We Are Not Just a Diversity Checkbox Part 3
There are people who partially fit the stereotypes of their sexuality (butch lesbians, effeminate gay men, sex-repulsed asexuals, etc.) but in media they are often presented as caricatures. These negative portrayals in media lead to real-life queer people who fit these stereotypes being attacked by other queer people, mostly due to the fear of exposing the MOGII community as a whole to the negativity attached to those stereotypes. In both fiction and in real life, all members of the MOGII community deserve to be respected and respectfully represented, regardless of how they express themselves. Instead of telling MOGII people who have stereotypical characteristics to change themselves, we should destroy the negativity that’s been tacked onto those stereotypes.
There’s a balance between having a character whose story isn’t about being a queer person, and recognizing the lack of positive MOGII representation in media so the inclusion of the character isn’t just ticking off another diversity box for good press. According to Kaje on the Goodreads thread, “the key is to make the individual characters interesting, or give them some kind of roundedness mixed in,” but it’s also important to keep in mind that while sexuality/gender identity should only be one facet of a character, it does need to be fully acknowledged.
On the Count of Three, previously The Bermudez Triangle
The Bermudez Triangle by Maureen Johnson
Sometimes, authors try to include and acknowledge queer characters with good intentions, but end up with a mess. The Bermudez Triangle, republished as On the Count of Three by Maureen Johnson (Razorbill 2007, Penguin Young Readers Group 2013) follows three best friends Nina, Avery, and Mel. Nina goes away for the summer, and the other two girls start dating. When Nina comes back, awkward third-wheeling ensues. It sounds cute and fun, but having the bisexual girl (Avery) cheat on Mel with a guy and then dump her for that guy because “bi girls… go back and forth” (p. 152) isn’t okay. Neither is the way a minor character, Felicia, is referred to as: “the outspoken ‘if you have a pulse I’m interested’ bisexual sex-addict.” (p. 121) There’s so little bisexual representation in YA lit, and the messages quite a few of those books send are incredibly biphobic. Similarly, in The Ring & The Crown by Melissa de la Cruz, portrayal of gay characters takes a turn for the worse. There is a gay couple who only appears during balls and similar events to make comments about fashion and by one of the main character’s fabulous gay friends.
Thankfully, there are also books such as Far From You by Tess Sharpe (Indigo 2014) that hit the nail on the head. The main character, Sophie, was in a secret relationship with Mina. Mina is killed before the story begins, but the reader gets to meet her because the book alternates between flashbacks and present-day. When Sophie tells Trev that she and Mina were in love, he worries that she faked the romantic relationship between him and her. But she tells him, “I’m not gay, I’m bisexual. There’s a difference.” (p. 188)
There is good MOGII representation out there in YA lit, though it can be hard to find. Two examples are Adaptation by Malinda Lo, which I’ve mentioned here before, and Beauty Queens by Libba Bray. Adaptation features a bisexual protagonist in an awesome sci-fi story. Beauty Queens is a hilarious adventure/survival novel that has several main characters, one who is a trans woman and one who is a lesbian, and they both get their own stories and personalities. (Also there are lots of footnotes. I really love footnotes.)
One of the ways we’re going to disassociate the negativity from stereotypes is by fleshing out those characters beyond their personality traits that are stereotypes of their sexuality or gender identity. For me, it would mean so much to see an asexual character who isn’t seen as broken, doesn’t have any romantic relationships invalidated by others because they’re asexual, and isn’t constantly reassuring people that they definitely have sex just like “normal people.” Having more people know about and hopefully respect asexuality would make me feel safer when I happen to talk about my asexuality with others.
I’m Emily, an asexual kinda-girl/kinda-agender lesbian in an American high-school straight out of a TV teen drama. I’m also a sci-fi/fantasy book and comic enthusiast. I can be found in one of the three libraries I have a card for, my local bookstore, the awesome comic store in my town that has fluffy cats, or at my computer. My goal is to become an editor at a Young Adult fiction publishing imprint. Twitter: @captainbooknerd, tumblr: adventureswithinthepages.tumblr.com