Order
“The Summer Prince” HERE
Read
An Excerpt HERE
I
hardly even know where to start with Alaya
Dawn Johnson's The Summer Prince.
There is SO MUCH going on in this book.
The Summer Prince is a post-apocalyptic
YA, which isn't really my thing, but this book is not about how to survive or
recover from the apocalypse: the city is flourishing, except for those the
government prefers not to see.
It
also gets major points for me for not being based in North America. We hear a
little about the state of North America, but more about other places,
especially Japan, and the story itself is set in future-Brazil. Alaya evokes the feeling of this place
so well that I don't just want to visit Brazil, I want to learn capoeira, and samba.
I
didn't like the main character. I didn't like most of the characters, really,
which normally kills my ability to get into a story, but not this time. I
didn't need to like the characters for them to carry the story. I understood
what I needed to, and the characters called each other on their bullshit as it
arose.
Alaya uses a pretty
interesting structure: the POV of the interludes was a pretty quick mystery to
solve, which made them even more effective. The prose of those interludes is
even more lyrical than the rest of the book. There are some truly breathtaking
moments.
The
story challenges gender biases: in a city that is ruled by Aunties, with a
mythology that men destroyed the world, rule by women is no better or worse. It
was so refreshing to read a story where the characters' different sexualities
and preferences mattered NOT AT ALL. Whatever “scandalous” behavior the main
characters could — and were — accused of, this was not one of
them.
There were some
moments where I felt like the text was being provocative and including elements
that scandalize YA-haters just to prove the point that they're not a big deal,
not because they actually helped the story at all. But as narrative criticisms
go, I'm almost not sure I can even count that.
Alaya problematizes technology and
accessing it: the speed of evolution and the relative merits of controlling its
spread, and to whom. She deals with social perception, how image and media can
be manipulated for or against people and spiral out of their control even if
they started deliberately. How gestures (or founding political documents…) are
interpreted and distorted, sometimes even generations later. She explores the
power of youth to change the world, even when their elders treat them like
tokens. Characters have an array of perspectives on age, on family, on
friendship, and on the responsibility that comes with each. We see class
struggles in the lack of general public awareness of what goes on that the
people in power don't want to have seen, and how art can highlight those
things.
Art
is very much a thread through every part of this story: how do you define art,
and what makes it valuable?
The
characters arrive at different answers, but they're asking the kinds of
questions I love to see in all books, but especially in YA: how far is it okay
to go to get what you want? When is sticking by principle and losing everything
you want the right choice, and how do you know where to draw that line? Because
actions and choices have consequences. There are a lot of struggles with
agency: fighting to have it, to make choices that matter and that personally
effect (no, not a typo) their own lives.
I
have a lot of mixed thoughts about some of the choices that get made, but the
story itself is so thought-provoking that I highly recommend looking into The Summer Prince.
12:00 AM | 
Posted by
Robert |
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1 comments:
I've recently been interested in how many post-apocalyptic books are coming out. They all seem to be dealing with the same issues: humanity's destruction of the environment, questioning social classes, and over-controlling governments. A post-apocalyptic book that deals with art would be a different take on the "same old" story. Thanks for the review!