11) The Summer Prince by Alaya Dawn Johnson

The Summer Prince is a YA novel set in a post-apocalyptic world 400 (at least) years into the future. The setting is the pyramid city of Palmares Tres, a world of rigid class hierarchy, incredible medical technology, enforced personal appearance standards, and a few very intelligent and creative teenagers who are about to change everything. June is 17, artistic, angry and directionless. When her best friend Gil falls in love with the doomed Summer King, Enki, and Enki in turn takes an interest in June's artistic energy, the Queen and ruling Aunties race to contain what may become a meaningful threat to their status quo.

This is a city run by women where every five years a King is crowned and acts as figurehead for a year and then is sacrificed before naming the next Queen. Lifespans are generally no less than one hundred twenty years and those under thirty (wakas) are viewed with almost tangible distrust and dismay. Alaya Dawn Johnson fills this world with the energy of creation thwarted at almost every turn by conservative social mores and unquestioned expectations. Her main character comes of someone's age in the span of a year, and at the end of it I am uncertain what her old age will finally be. How does someone who grew out of youth faster than fingernails ever really age?

Johnson uses light, color, sound and the reminders of smell to fill this airy place with the reality of life. The Summer Prince is a novel that demands careful reading - no skimming here, there is too much layered in the tiers and tech and spaces between.

I mean, look at those lights! 

I remember reading this standing up in a hotel room during Winter Institute 2013. Alaya Dawn Johnson was there signing copies of her book, and I grabbed one because I thought the cover looked intriguing (this is a real). There is so much to notice here. This is a book where sex is just part of life and none of it is forced. Violence is limited; when it happens it is deadly serious but it is never gratuitous and it is never glorified. Of particular interest to me is the complexity of the government and its oppressive rule, even though it is all women - a notion that got just enough air time to land and grow in the mind of this reader. Also that sexuality is not enforced; people love and lust and befriend and boff and where it may lead to drama, it doesn't, because the characters have a ton of higher stakes nonsense to worry about.

That is something truly wonderful to me in this book - everyone (everyone) talks about art like it is serious work. They dance as language and emotion. They eat to share and experience. Those elements do not become redemptive forces as they generally do in stories about uptight business people traveling to warm climates or interacting with "colorful" people. They are simply part of the fabric of living, of the rhythms of friendship. Friends and lovers touch. Friends and lovers plot and plan and make grand gestures and fail each other. 

I would love to have read this as a teenager. To have known adventure almost entirely without guns. To have loved a story about loving and feeling and thinking and being creative and learning to see privilege and use it to bridge gaps rather than maintain distance. June's focus is so personal and uncomplicated that at 43 I'm undone by it and left wondering just what can I do to bring such delicate and deliberate work out in my own world.

Also - and this is just a bit of a thought - remember the part about the oppressive matriarchy? It happens in another book later. It doesn't happen often in books. I'm paying attention.