Wednesday, March 6, 2019

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Summer Prince by Alaya Dawn Johnson




The Summer Prince is a Young Adult Science Fiction Novel by Alaya Dawn Johnson, featuring a future post-apocalyptic Brazil.  But while Post-Apocalyptic YA Scifi (or Science Fantasy hybrids) are rather common these days, The Summer Prince distinctly refuses to follow the typical conventions of this subgenre in quite a few ways.  And it's a book about love (both sexual and familial), sacrifice, representation, freedom, family, art and oh so much more and is not one for giving particularly easy answers where the questions it poses are concerned, and it's all the better for it as a result.

And oh does Johnson weave these ideas and unconventional take on this subgenre together to form a really fascinating and wonderful book.  The Summer Prince contains of multiple fantastic characters, particularly its three leads, and a setting that is really well done in the future city of Palmares Tres.  It has a three way romance that goes in ways you wouldn't really expect but is anything but antagonistic and while the ending isn't really a happy ending, it is indeed a satisfying one.  This isn't a perfect book, but it's really really well done and highly recommended.

---------------------------------------------Plot Summary----------------------------------------------------
Hundreds of years from now, the Pyramid City of Palmares Tres is seemingly thriving in the middle of what once was what we know as Brazil.  The City is governed in a rather unique way: every five years a King is elected, a "Summer King," who spends the next year being celebrated throughout the city....only to be killed at the end of that year, with the King then choosing the real ruler of the city, the Queen by blood or gesture with his dying breath.

June Costa and her friend Gil fall for the new Summer King Enki right from the start, along with most of her fellow Wakas - the young people of the City.  June is an artist, specializing in making pictures - using the City, Paper, or even her own Body as her canvas - and she and Gil conspire to make Art that will draw Enki's attention....and it does do that: it draws Enki and Gil together as a couple.

But despite her disappointment, June finds herself working on art with Enki as well, and finds that the new King, a boy from the City's outskirt slums known as the "Verde," is even more than the eccentric than he appears.  Like June, he's an artist, but with plans on a grand scale she could never have imagined on her own, plans to truly show the City of Palmares Tres to its rulers and occupants.  Together they will create new art and protests that will portend massive change for the city.  And as the clock ticks down on the last year remaining before Enki's death, June finds herself torn between her own possible future and the love she has for Enki, and the need she has to do something to save him...
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My plot description above is terrible, but I kept rewriting it enough times that I'm just leaving it at that (the Amazon plot summary is better I think).  There's an awful lot going on here in a book that really isn't that long (Amazon lists it as 304 pages), and somehow managing to sum it all up in just 2-3 paragraphs is seemingly impossible.  But as I noted up before the jump, Johnson makes all of the above ideas - or at least most of them - work together without the book feeling overly stuffed or skimping on examining any of the ideas, so it wall works incredibly well.

The book is essentially written from the perspective of two narrators.  95% of the book is written from June's first person perspective, as events happen in the present, with occasional snippets (in italics in the ebook version) written in past-tense from another character's perspective.  Those snippets make clear the final fate of one of the characters once it becomes pretty clear who's writing them (which is apparently fairly quickly - I'm being overly cautious in not spoiling here), but that never really poses a problem for the narrative.

The main reason for that is that the characters are so so damn good.  June is a fascinating lead - she's deeply insecure about her own art and abilities, still struggling with the loss of her father three years back and her resultant distrust of her mother and her new stepmother, who wants to catch Enki's love and yet also doesn't want to hurt her best friend Gil when Gil actually catches that love first....there's a lot there in June, I could go on a long rant about all of her attributes and traits.  She's dealing with issues of love, regret, impostor's syndrome, distrust of authority, insecurity after being handed authority, insecurity about her wants and desires and her own sense of justice....I'm doing it again and going on a rant.  She's a deeply complex character who always feels real in her feelings and desires, and she tops it off by being excellent and unique in her ways of reacting to those feelings - whether that be just by her reactions to people or by her creativity in her art - which is pretty damn creative, especially with Enki's help.

Enki and Gil are also excellent as the secondary main characters.  Enki might seem like the rebel from the slums just trying to cause problems and help his people, but he's far deeper than that, driven to do certain things which seem almost horrifying in what they entail for him, and the way he loves is fascinating.  Gil is less developed and plays off the other two characters, but rather than being the playboy who'd be jealous that Enki would love anyone else, he's genuine when he says he's happy if Enki was to love June also, and his attempts to try and bolster June and get her to realize her mother and stepmother are not her enemy make the two of them a great pair.  And the clear secondary minor characters are all well developed as well, whether that be the friendly rival, or June's mother and stepmother, who have their own views and beliefs and ways of caring about June and the world.  They're all just fantastically developed and none seem cartoonish (with maybe one minor exception see below)

And then there's the world and plot of this book.  Palmares Tres is a fascinating city, with advanced technology that is still years behind what some other parts of the world have, a city where anti-aging technology has spurred conflicts and resentment between people of different ages, and yet in which the possibilities for people are tremendous, as is the technology that is present.  And it serves as a perfect setting for this story, a story about love, sacrifice, the meaning and personal nature of art, of conflict, and more.  A story that takes constant surprising twists and turns, but never feels off putting in how it goes, and which enraptured me from the very start - I finished this book in under 24 hours, and would've finished it quicker if not for other responsibilities.

These characters, and the setting and plot are great in how they subvert the usual tropes of novels like this in such wondrous ways.  For example June is a privileged young person who understands that the underclass in the Verde are not served by the governing policies, but doesn't truly understand how those people truly live even when shown glimpses by Enki - in a typical book she'd be shocked at what she sees, change her ways somewhat and become an ally, but this book isn't interested in such cartoonish simplistic drastic changes.  There's also Palmares Tres itself, which is troubled in so many damn ways - even aside from ritual sacrifice of its Kings, there's the class conflict between the young people (the "Wakas") who make up the minority of the population in a future where people live for two plus centuries and the older "Grandes" who are in charge, there's the conflict over the use of technology such as body modifications, etc etc.  In another book, these conflicts would lead to revolution, or reveal Palmares Tres as a dystopia, with its strong-arm rulers needing overthrowing before things can get better.  But not here, and in fact Palmares Tres is still presented as kind of a utopia, in which even the underclasses live far far better than those who are stuck on the outside, and which the reader can imagine themselves wanting to live there in the future.  I could go on and on about how the subversions keep surprising, and more importantly how they're done damn well.

I'm kind of rambling throughout this review, so I'll stop here and just go onto the few perhaps critiques I have, which aren't much.  The only character who kind of felt cartoonish is the Queen, and that makes her stick out kind of a bit in comparison to the rest of the cast, but she still works.  And I kind of wanted to know more about how the governance in Palmares Tres really worked at the end of it all, besides the basics, but it's such a side issue that I can't see how it would've been fit in without feeling like an unnecessary info-dump, and it's more a testament to how great this world is that I want to know more about it.

I came really close to giving The Summer Prince a perfect score in the end, and it just misses that mind-blowingness I tend to get upon finishing one of my perfect score novels by a small bit and so It gets just a 9.5.  But it is fantastic and WELL worth your time, even I'm pretty sure the above review doesn't really describe coherently how the book is so great.
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