SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Love is the Drug by Alaya Dawn Johnson

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Love is the Drug by Alaya Dawn Johnson: https://t.co/62OuX5VCuy Short Review: 8 out of 10 (1/3)

— Josh (garik16) (@garik16) July 1, 2019

Short Review (cont): A near-future SF thriller featuring a Teenage Black HS Senior being hounded by a white intelligence operative for government secrets she might secretly know has some really great characters/development, if a little laughable in the plot setup. (2/3)

— Josh (garik16) (@garik16) July 1, 2019

Love is the Drug is a YA near-future sci-fi novel by Alaya Dawn Johnson.  This is the book Johnson published before The Summer Prince (Which I LOVED - review here) and it actually won the Norton (Nebula) Award for best SF/F YA Novel in 2015.  So it was pretty inevitable that I was going to grab this book at some point, and when it showed up on Hoopla in audiobook form, I immediately put it on my list.

The result is a book that's definitely enjoyable, with a really strong main character and some solid side characters, such that I finished this rather quickly even for an audiobook.  It's not quite on the level of The Summer Prince - some of the aspects of the setting and the characters are a bit silly (and hilariously don't quite make sense based upon how the world works) - but it's a fun book which deals solidly with issues of race and class along the way.  There may be some minor pacing issues but overall the very solid characters make this one an enjoyable book worth your time, even if not a must-read.

Note: I read this as an audiobook, and the audiobook reader is generally good, although she doesn't do a great job at changing her voice/making it clear when the book leaves the main character's POV for end-of-chapter excerpts.  Still solid in that format tho.

More specifics after the jump:


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In a near future, the US seems on the verge of war with Venezuela.  Indeed the US blames Venezuela-backed terrorists for the creation and spread of a deadly flu strain, the V-Flu, which has created a pandemic around the world, including in California and other parts of the US.  But Emily Bird doesn't care about that - as a senior at one of DC's most prominent prep schools, with the seemingly perfect boyfriend, and admission to Stanford seemingly assured, it seems like her life should be perfect.

But Bird doesn't really want that life - a life pushed upon her by her mother, who works as a scientist doing confidential work for the US Government.  Instead she wishes she could simply open up a shop of her own on U Street, and that she could be with someone who could see her for who she truly is.  But when Bird goes to a party thrown by her boyfriend's friend, it seems like those dreams are an impossibility.

And then Bird wakes up 8 days later from a coma, with no memories of the last 7 days, and only scattered memories of that party.  And everything has seemingly changed: the flu pandemic has reached DC, her boyfriend is asking shifty, and a White Guy - going by the name "Roosevelt David" - who works with a mysterious black-ops security group is refusing to leave her alone, harassing her over something she supposedly knows about her parents' work.  And Roosevelt seemingly won't stop till he gets what he wants from her - something she has no clue about - to the point of going after not only Bird, but her family as well.

With her life in disarray, Bird will be forced to rely upon people she'd seemingly never previously consider part of her social circle: another black girl her old friends made fun of for being an out-lesbian at an all-girls school and a drug dealing boy with a specialty in organic chemistry who's a bit of a conspiracy nut.  And perhaps by figuring out who she really is and wants to be, instead of who her mom wants her to be, Bird can find a way to get this asshole off her back and to discover what it is she really knows...and why the special agent thinks she's a threat to national security.
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Love is the Drug is written from the third point of view of Bird, although its narration also gives the perspective of being told from some mysterious omniscient narrator at times - particularly at the end of each chapter where the story diverges from chronological order to offer either short commentary on the characters/situation or just past history.  This could be a little weird and I'm not particularly sure it adds anything, but it doesn't really alter things much so it's not really a big deal overall.

What helps this is that Bird is a really strong lead character for this story, a teenager filled with internal contradictions driven by her own internal identity crisis.  The book is pretty direct about this with the reader, as sometimes Bird is discussed in terms of what "Emily" (the girl she used to be before the party) would do in contrast to what "Bird" would do, with Emily being passive, willing to be used by others like her boyfriend for their own ambitions, and cowtowing before her mother, while Bird tries to be more assertive.  Keyword there on "tries", because the book understands that such a transformation doesn't occur merely overnight, and so much of this book is Bird struggling, with the help of her friends, to be more of who she wants to be, in the face of those who would try instead to make her submit.  The book also hammers home how hard it is for someone like Bird - a Black teen, even a well-off-financially one - to try and take control in an America that doesn't look kindly on strong assertive black women who don't do what others tell them.  Bird isn't perfect as a character - it takes an awful long time for Bird to respond to her mother's emotionally abusive treatment of her, to the point where it kind of gets a little ridiculous - but she's very strong and easy to root for as a result, and carries this book.

It helps that Bird's friends and family (not her parents) are pretty damn strong characters in their own rights, especially as their relationships grow with Bird.  Fellow Black Teen Marella, ostracized in Bird's original crowd for being openly lesbian in an all-girls school, makes a strong supportive friend once Bird opens up to her, and is a great sidekick.  But the real star is Bird's love-interest Coffee, the Brazilian drug dealer and chemistry nut (and conspiracy theorist at times) who forms a guiding light for Bird as she attempts to figure things out with Roosevelt.  And Bird's growing relationship with Coffee, and her insecurities as things move on in the book, form the emotional core of this story, and it really really works.  This story is a story about Bird's struggle for her own identity and her understanding of how one can truly love another, in this case Coffee, and it works so damn well as a result of who these two characters are and the journey they go on.

The antagonist characters however are a bit less successful - Bird's parents are blatantly abusive and while definitely realistic in some ways, I just wanted to shoot them both more than anything, with the story never really giving a reason for how they wound up how they were (her mother Carol repeatedly talks about how she wanted to give Bird a better life than Carol had, but no details of that ever come).  Bird's original boyfriend, Paul is a jackass willing to do seemingly anything for his own ambition and the book never really finds any redeeming qualities for him and Bird's refusal to just drop him quickly is again kind of annoying from the outside.

Antagonist Roosevelt is however pretty strong as a terrifying white authority figure preying on the teenage Black girl for unjust reasons, so he works at least.  Similarly, the setting of this on-edge world and unfriendly DC to people like Bird is very compelling, although some of the catalyst of that world is kind of laughable - the book founds part of its setting's global conflict upon a blatant misunderstanding of how oil prices work, which someone who didn't know any better could ignore, but made me crack up.*

*Venezuela uses global warming as an excuse to massively increase taxes on its oil barrel sales.  In the real world, this would cause a slight increase in oil sales due to a decrease in supply, and drastically hurt Venezuela's economy as people buy their oil elsewhere - there's a reason why Venezuela cooperates with the global oil producing community to match prices mainly....and a reason why when oil prices fell drastically due to fracking, Venezuela found its economy in crisis, as the loss of profit killed everything.  But here it apparently causes the world to have an oil crisis instead?  Yeah, no.  

But yeah, the great lead characters, the excellent tale of identity, love, and discovery for a Black teen in a dangerous White world, and the excellently done ending make Love is the Drug a very solid and fun book that's worth your time.  It's not The Summer Prince, but well, it's just a step below.