A STORY ABOUT GRIEF AND GHOSTS
What a gorgeous book about guys and grief and ghosts! If you like gay fiction with supernatural elements, you should check this out.
Before I tell you what the story is about, let me just say – this is one of the best books I have read, maybe even the best one this year. And it’s a debut! I can only imagine what the author can do with their future books. I am blown away… but first, the story.
Summer Sons is about two boys – Andrew and Eddie, best friends, connected by a horrible event in their adolescence. As close as friends and then brothers can be. Unfortunately, that is not the story presented to us. One of the boys, Eddie, dies, leaving Andrew alone and drowning in grief, when the time comes to start his graduate program. It’s what Eddie planned, to get them together again, because Eddie went early. It was the first time the boys – young men – were separated, and Andrew had no idea what Eddie had been up to for those months he was there. To make it much worse, everyone says that Eddie committed suicide and Andrew doesn’t believe it. He has to find the truth.
This book is full of atmospheric descriptions, lovable characters, extreme emotions, and a murder mystery plot to boot. Rarely do I feel like I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t keep turning the pages. The author’s ability to grasp you by the throat and keep squeezing is unparalleled. I read a lot of books and I don’t say this lightly – this book has everything it needs to be one of the best reads of recent years. It’s one of the books that has yet again reminded me how much I love reading and why. A good story can transport you into a parallel world and make you feel like it’s so real, more so than reality itself.
The thing is, this book is about a couple of things – it’s first and foremost about grief, and the other thing it’s about is ghosts. From the start, we have to learn everything we can about Eddie and his relationship with Andrew, and we have to struggle through Andrew’s anger and numbness and fear, which makes me think the author really knows what true grief feels like. I could feel it myself, for the whole duration of the book, but the fast forward motion of the events gave me the relief I needed. I enjoyed meeting all of Eddie’s friends, getting to know them, seeing relationships bloom between them and Andrew. I loved the queerness of the book, the unusual relationships, the realness of the events and the people in them, but most of all, I loved the insanely creepy haunts/revenants/ghosts, and the curse.
Because other than grief and finding your way out of it, this story is about ghosts, about what remains of a person after they have died and the holds it has on the people it’s left behind. About whether the best idea is to hold on to them and how much of it is really worth holding onto.
Truly, a masterful piece I cannot give less than 5 stars to. I especially liked the romance that bloomed between Andrew and one of the other characters, since he really deserved to live, and love, again. This is a really scary and really hopeful piece about life after death, and about becoming who you were meant to be, and about the chances we never take and the consequences of those.
And listen, I don’t necessarily like reading about bisexual awakening in books, but this one was handled so beautifully, I definitely didn’t mind, and that’s saying something. Also, bear in mind, the twist is not something that will knock your socks off, but I don’t believe that’s the point of the book. The point is to take you on an emotional journey, not to surprise you or make you gasp. That’s at least what I got from my own subjective experience of reading the book. Yours might differ from mine, as it should.
So if you want to read a story about a young man who lost someone very important, who has to solve the mystery of that loss, and about hot car races and queer love and hungry ghosts, this is the book for you. It will grab your heart and squeeze it until there is no more feeling left. It will empty you of emotions and fill you up again. It will make you smile and cry and hope that you will one day know love like this, and that you will be able to let go, if you had to, like Andrew did. So proud of our boy, even though he fought the whole time. So proud of the author. Proud of myself, too, for finding this.
Proud of you, too, for being brave enough to pick up this book. Enjoy.
Reviewed by Violeta Nedkova
