booksthatburn's Reviews (1.46k)

SUMMER SONS is a long exhalation after a reckless sprint, a tale of grief and queer masculinity as Andrew slowly wrestles with who his best friend was to him, and the betrayal he feels at finding out after Eddie’s death that other people knew different sides. Andrew begins by resenting every new thing he finds, every way that Eddie was someone else with someone else, and disturbed that these other people would have any interest in knowing him too. As he slowly works his way through his resentment and grief (with the help of an occasional punch to jolt him out of his own ass), Andrew gets closer to the car-racing, hot, young men who filled Eddie’s nights, circling warily around the academics of Ahis days who seem hell-bent on making Andrew pick up where Eddie left off. The problem is that Andrew doesn’t know who he and Eddie were, and the achingly slow process of figuring out what that was is being complicated by the way Eddie’s haunt keeps filling Andrew’s throat with earth, loam, dirt, and death whenever he has a moment alone. 

The characterization is complex and well-executed, generally following Andrew’s understanding of the people around him. As he’s able to observe more from behind the veil of his grief, they, too, come into focus. It's a story of queer masculinity, including the difficult tangle of emotions which can make embracing one's queerness without giving up masculinity in the context of a rural Southern existence. 

This is beautiful and ultimately satisfying, unafraid to fill itself up with jagged pieces and look you in the eye as it names the broken bits one by one in their slow exhumation from Andrew’s soul. 

This is a trans-affirming sci-fi book with a premise revolving around someone who has the ability to (in certain contexts) manipulate genetics. It's lovely to read something that doesn't try to "fix" the trans character, but finds other solutions for the in-universe problems caused by their chromosomal situation. It's similarly understanding and cathartic around issues including but not limited to neglect and food restriction. The tagline is "There's a fine line between survival and cruelty", and the overall arc is of someone who was raised under the claim of survival-driven scarcity, slowly, in a zone of love and abundance, untangling which parts of her upbringing were actually just cruel. 

Major pieces of backstory and world-building are conveyed in a series of well-described but pretty dense infodumps, one at the very start and a few more sprinkled throughout the rest of the text. They felt a bit clunky but were sufficiently brief as to keep from being overwhelming. The overall effect works well and I love the main characters.

The stories shared a style that I didn't like but don't know how to describe. Since this is an anthology I thought maybe I'd like some stories better than others, but partway through the fourth one I tried, I stopped. The stories tended to gesture at deeper backstories but leaned overly on telling what cool stuff happened before, without letting any of that happen in the present narrative. 
One of the stories contains a graphic depiction of pregnancy and I wasn't able to handle much more after that, so I stopped shortly thereafter. 

It’s tricky to pivot from a stand-alone book into book two of what is retroactively transformed into a series, but this manages it pretty well. The expanded scope of the dystopia’s history and new plotlines fit pretty well into what UNWIND left behind. The mere fact of the War and the Accords is given more detail and proximate causes in a way that is consistent with the earlier information even as it provides direction for the series going forward. While I like UNWIND a bit more than UNWHOLLY, I’m pretty pleased nonetheless and I look forward to finishing the whole series.

It continues several things left hanging from UNWIND but doesn't really wrap them up. It has several storylines which start here, and a few major things that are both introduced and resolved. It leaves a lot to be addressed in the future, including enough info to give a sense of a possible trajectory or next step for some of it. Some of the narrators are returning but most are new. Other than what information they have access to, I don't think the characters were very distinct. That might be because there are so many narrators that they blur together no matter how well they're written, I'm not sure. This might make sense if someone started here and didn't know about the first book, since this is starting a new arc for the series. 

There are two story decision which seem strange and might be particular distressing. The first is that "storked" (involuntarily adopted) kids are more likely to be unwound. It makes sense, given the worldbuilding, and I appreciate the synergy between the shape of the dystopia and the way it affects the characters. The other strange thing is that (unless I really missed something), there's no mention of kids being unwound for being queer (or being happily queer with their parents and no intention of unwinding). While it would be nice to think that this dystopia meant to be in chronological continuity with real-world early 2000's somehow doesn't have a drop of queerphobia or homophobia anywhere... to me it leaves behind the fridge horror question of "where are all the queer kids?"

Overall I liked it, I'm intrigued by the trajectory and I'm planning to finish the series.

I loved this book as a kid, and I agree that it's appropriately marketed as children's' fantasy. It's a similar kind of book to the Redwall series, starring anthropomorphized animals serving as allegories for themes ranging from sexism to genocide to fascism. I could see an argument that it's not trying to be an allegory because the story also has humans with their own particular role, but since I'm pretty sure no deer has tried to implement fascism, I think the antagonists' methods and goals firmly move this into allegorical territory, or perhaps fable-as-warning.

The narrative arc is solid, the prophecy is simultaneously foreshadowing and motivation, and there's a significant amount of attention and agency for the female characters. Heck, there are several bucks who would have been in the spotlight in most other books, but instead there's a lot of attention paid to Willow (and a decent amount of narrative for Peppa). Rannoch learns about the existence of other kinds of deer where the females also have antlers, but they're never depicted and the mentions serves mostly to have Rannoch learn that there's more to the world than he knew before. When there is a herd where the hinds are in charge, it's treated as a bad thing (yes, they are doing something that is pretty bad, but even then their power is in service to a hidden male herd and now we're back to the hinds not actually having power).

There's enough detail on the (rather large) cast to make each of their personalities memorable, but as they grow the focus narrows to Rannoch, Willow, and somewhat Bankfoot (plus various older deer as necessary), this keeps the story moving and works well overall. There are occasional infodumps about the history of Scotland, where this is set, and even though they do bring the story to a screeching halt most of the time I did enjoy them. They're pretty brief and serve to imply a grander scope to this story which takes place canonically over a decade and a half since it has to fit within the lifespan of a single deer. 

Something that was consistently frustrating for me is the fatphobic obsession with Bankfoot’s size. It doesn’t make sense for the other fawns to have made fun of him for being fat, since as a deer, being well-fed should be a good thing. It shouldn’t be seen as bad for humans either, but given that it often is, I can only guess that human-centric fatphobia underlies this story. It means this details is both fatphobic and nonsensical in the world of the story, and since this same character has a stutter he later mostly grows out of as a matures, I'm torn between seeing this as a (still fatphobic but possibly not ableist) portrayal of a kid who is bullied for not fitting in and then still grows up to be heroic and important... or just a way of putting uniquely human problems into a character who is a deer, in a way that doesn't actually serve the story but just shames kids reading it who might see themselves in him. I'm really not sure which one it is, since no part of "body shamed until you grow out of it with no actual intervention or effort" is just fatphobic.

As for the main villain... he's is a disabled deer who resents being disabled. He's just disabled enough for the bucks to discount him and for him to have difficulty finding mates... but still able to orchestrate a genocide. To me this is the worst of both worlds. You can have a villain who is disabled and also is a villain, but there's a direct link between his disability and his villainy whose only saving grace is that it's not a disability that could be shared by a reader (except through the lens that all humans are hummels). There's gender essentialism all throughout, since he's seen as less than a stag (the narrative skirts the edge of transphobia without actually falling in) and there's very little consideration given to the hinds who are forced to mate with him, except to note that they exist.

I enjoyed this as a kid, but I don't recommend it now. 

I liked most of this. The characters are engaging, the angel and demon are fantastic, the plot is pretty well paced, and most of the humor is spot on. However, it has threads of homophobia wound throughout the book, despite the character in question canonically being "sexless". A lot of the homophobic jokes are made by characters we're meant to dislike, but it disrupted my enjoyment of an otherwise great story.

If you're looking to the book to see if you'd like the show, the homophobia and pacing issues are some of the things that the show fixed, and I recommend you just watch that instead of trying to read the original material.