Review by chulliam - Summer Sons

You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.

chulliam 's review for:

Summer Sons by Lee Mandelo

3.5

mysterious reflective tense slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Complicated

Loveable characters: Complicated

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

The first thing I will admit is I just picked a book up with a queer storyline, I knew there were tropes I didn't love going in, specifically slow burn. Which ended up impacting my reading experience significantly, who woulda thought. However, the gothic horror, Southern setting, and graduate school politics hooked me in.

I agree with some other comments that the horror plot was a little predictable once it started coming to fruition, which only started about halfway through the book.

It's basically a long-winded episode of Supernatural (they actually reference Supernatural, imagine my excitement) in terms of who the villain ended up being and how the climax was done with a very classic drugging, ritualistic bondage, and threatening of loved ones before a narrow escape.

When I learned the true culprit of Eddie's death it kind of made me wonder what the point of a lot of the investigation and the initial mystery around Eddie's activities was.

There's a lot of ambiguity about the crowd Eddie ran with, but the conclusion is that Eddie just got along with them and I guess that Sam gave him an in to investigate local ghost stories. Then there's ambiguity with the local ghost stories implying maybe Eddie was killed for something he investigated, but that doesn't really go anywhere. A lot of the book is spent on the idea that he was killed for his research or a personal grudge, which also didn't end up being true, though I would've been pissed if West was made a villain so I appreciate that. Turns out, he was killed for something unrelated to anything he even did at Vanderbilt, so investigation-wise it was not very important for us to know any of that.

For me, a good mystery ties together all the clues we received throughout the book in a subversive way.

Upon writing this it seems like, contrarily, all of this could contribute to an increasingly critical view of Eddie as a person. He was hanging in parties of destructive, homophobic white folks and drinking in their praise; he was relishing and starving for more knowledge about the occult powers harnessed by his evil plantation-owning ancestors; he shamelessly bathed in his privilege as an old-money white guy from the South, overshadowing a Black student who was clearly being subdued by the University with little regard. On top of all of that, he had an unstable, possessive, and entirely imbalanced homoerotic relationship with his best friend where they both used some poor girl they didn't care about as a conduit for their repressed longing. For how much Andrew glorified Eddie in his head at the beginning of the book, it could have been really interesting if Andrew followed all these threads thinking Eddie was horribly victimized by one of these realities, only to learn that no-Eddie was just a shitty guy victimized by even shittier people. Maybe he wasn't *evil* or something, as he still helped Riley and I guess Sam out quite a bit, but he's not a great dude and arguably made Andrew somewhat shitty as well.

The book certainly characterizes Eddie as having betrayed Andrew in several ways, but doesn't really view him as actually morally grey in any way. If the different phases in the investigation didn't contribute to the actual mystery, I wish they had served an alternative purpose like this.

To move to characters, Andrew is a frustrating protagonist and that doesn't seem like a rare opinion. The thing is this isn't an inherently bad thing, there's a lot of value in having a character that is constantly making questionable decisions. The issue is his characteristics throughout the book impede the pace of the story.

Andrew wants to investigate his friend's death, yet is so socially and emotionally closed off that he refuses to even attempt to open up with the people he befriended in Nashville to get real information. This makes perfect sense, it's a character flaw as well as a result of grief.

However, this essentially makes it so that he barely has meaningful conversations with any of the other characters until halfway through the book-which was not fun. We’re basically stuck inside Andrew's head for the whole first half of the book, where he cycles through the same 5 #gay thoughts. Second of all, this never really changes beyond him collecting investigation info/ideas from Riley and having one trauma dump with Sam, and none of the characters even put up that much resistance to this undeniably irritating element of his character. In the first half of the book, we learn that Riley, his friends, and Sam compared notes on Andrew because he weirded them all out, but there's no tangible consequences there.

His feral obsession with Eddie and overwhelming grief at his death to the point of not eating properly for weeks after it is another massive character flaw that as I mentioned earlier, I believe could have been acknowledged and concluded a little better by the story.

Riley was probably my favorite character, which I also believe is a pretty common take. Ironically I still found myself mentally shooing him out of the story every time he showed up because of the nature of the slow burn, but I’ll get to that. Riley is easy to like, he’s the ~smooth~ character of the bunch, whose character flaws aren’t as rampant or bothersome.

He’s just a fun but hardworking bi trans kid with far more emotional intelligence than the other ridiculously un-therapized men in his life.

To be honest, I loved the dynamic between Riley and West even though it was mostly a side plot. Two queer academics, each with their own privileges and disadvantages in their backgrounds, with petty resentment for each other who get into academic squabbles but still have an underlying respect between them against the world that oppresses them. I would’ve loved to see more of their actual interactions in the book.

While we’re talking about West, I do appreciate that the book dives head first into the suppression and workplace discrimination that POCs and especially Black folks face in academia.

It is kind of a cop out of an ending where West is praised by our main characters for opposing Vanderbilt for their discrimination, while those characters continue to pursue academia in the exact same department that he is accusing. But y’know baby steps. The book also doesn’t play games with plantation owners—every time they’re mentioned it’s acknowledged how disgusting they are with appropriate gravity. In this day and age where slavery and its horror are scarily downplayed, I appreciate that this romanticized tale of the South doesn’t sweep that under the rug.

On a similar note, though there is a noticeable lack of women in this book (which I’m not gonna clutch my pearls over but it’s worth mentioning),

I appreciate that Del in her role got to speak with her own voice about how Andrew and Eddie treated her. I think in a lot of these stories the woman-who-two-gay-men-projected-onto-in-a-threesome is always an afterthought. It’s always one of the men being like ‘hm, I wonder if that was just projection,’ with no regard to what it must do to someone to be used like that. Andrew was a dick to Del from the start of the book, and I’m glad that Del had a chance to say her piece; hell, she’s the only one to actually acknowledge Eddie as a shitty person.

So now, the romance. First let me say, I love this type of dynamic.

To throw in more Supernatural references and further sully my dignity, I love a Dean Winchester archetype paired with an uptight, equally toxically masculine person (known by many as the Asshole x Bastard archetype). I love the idea of two strong personalities butting heads, I love the tension between them when Andrew thinks Sam murdered Eddie. I love that they’re both heavily repressed and can only express affection in the form of ass-slapping pseudo masculinity. And I very much love the nickname ‘princess’. Call me toxic, I am.

Second of all, I hate slow burn and I signed up for slow burn, look I get it. However my main problem with slow burn is that it’s so concerned with blue-balls’ing you at every turn that it fails to recognize that a relationship flourishing—whether they have consummated that relationship in some way or not—is the beauty of it. The thing is, the horror/investigation plot was not very engaging for me particularly in the first half where it was going nowhere.

And I was rooting for the Andrew/Sam romance.

So every time I was lashed away from a moment of theirs to focus on this plot that was jogging in place I would get extremely frustrated.

And let’s be clear, Andrew and Sam were not a *romance* romance. They didn’t fall in love. Andrew is very much still getting over the decades long codependent bond with Eddie and is just barely discovering he’s even gay to begin with. The two have an extremely repressed dynamic, they are mostly just very fond of each other and interested in a romantic relationship. Hell, the end of the book is literally them starting over specifically because Andrew was very much not ready for a relationship at any earlier point in the book.

So if the investigation plot is boring me, and the romance plot is only meant to be a tertiary premature bond that we constantly lash away from rather than a full on love story …… it’s a bad combination.

I also thought the characterization of Sam in this bond, and throughout the book, was interesting. Because at the beginning, Sam Halse is portrayed as dangerous and living on the edge. He’s portrayed as this *force* worthy of actual fear, as Andrew’s inner dialogue described him. When Sam stopped that fight Andrew got into, Andrew literally wonders what happens to fights that Sam doesn’t stop. Andrew AND Riley point out that Sam’s parties consist mostly of stock image white dudes who are comfortable calling people fags at every turn. Of course, none of this means he’s an inherently bad person, but he’s certainly not portrayed as some kind of angel.

Yet when Sam confronts Andrew about not having killed Eddie, most of this is just chalked up to Andrew profiling him because he’s poor or whatever. And from that point on, he’s basically made out to be only aesthetically frat boy-ish, but practically just a regular protective guy. To the point that the two stock image white dude friends he brought to their first ride (in stark contrast with Riley's more diverse crew) basically disappear from the story after that.

This REALLY came out the first time him Andrew and Sam hooked up. Despite the tension between them, Sam gifts Andrew with a threesome for his birthday. You’d think this indicates some heavily repressed masculine energy, where Sam can recognize sexual feelings around Andrew but insists that they must have some kind of heterosexual three way explanation because the idea of him being gay doesn’t even cross his mind. But…… no. Andrew makes a move on Sam directly and Sam is a cool cucumber (sorry for that imagery) and even says that he has hooked up with guys before. And the next day these two brooding, heavily repressed men are cooking breakfast together like they've been married for 5 years.

Why put so much emphasis on the conventional white male crowd Sam hangs out with for the entire first half of the book, then suddenly make him 100% green flags when he’s hooking up with our protagonist? I figured Sam would put up a little more resistance, or have more nuanced feelings toward being physical with another man. I feel like the book really smoothed him out to make him a more palatable love interest and I didn’t love that. I think there’s a lot to unpack with Sam as a hyper-masculine persona who hangs around frat bros but still has a trans younger brother who he is extremely protective of.

I like that Andrew and Sam have to put their relationship on pause because Andrew is clearly still not over Eddie and quite literally has Eddie’s ghost living inside him. Good. But I think this could only have been made better by Sam also having his own shit to work out. Sam teeters between being a side piece love interest for the story and being a fully involved character, and I think the book needed to pick one.

As much bitching and moaning as I'm doing, I enjoyed reading Summer Sons. There's a lot of great ideas and characters, I just think the book took a very safe route with everything. There's just a lot in this book that I've already seen before, and I wanted it to take me somewhere new instead.

Content Warnings