Reviews with content warning for Drug abuse - Summer Sons

Reviews tagging 'Drug abuse'

Summer Sons by Lee Mandelo

28 reviews

jessnrusso's review against another edition

dark slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.0

This book was not scary, not thrilling, full of alpha men who don't want to feel feelings and instead drive fast cars and do drugs. Every dialogue scene went nowhere and was just pointless to me. I felt so bored. It was also set in a school setting with the main character somehow in grad school, though he barely went to any classes and didn't even care to be there. So why? The whole premise just didn't make sense to me.

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zafi's review against another edition

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dark emotional sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

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perkyanda's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional funny hopeful inspiring mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

If you like horror dark academia mystery southern gothic chaotic bi energy death magic, all with a trans character who it literally does not matter is trans and who you can’t tell is trans til it just happens to come up, I cannot recommend Summer Sons highly enough. The only thing that could improve it are more female characters but then it couldn’t be a book that is largely about male relationships. And it has one of the BEST scenes with a female character who is otherwise unimportant I’ve seen in a long time.

And it’s spicy at points which was NOT expected in a, well, horror but not horror but horror ok mystery maybe maybe suspense? Is dark academia even a genre or just a sub genre or a blend genre I don’t fucking know book

And while I normally don’t actually love spice in normal books and was surprised at the level of detail it didn’t feel gratuitous it felt extremely relevant to character development bc repression and male friendship and sexuality is a big part of the book

Honestly this book is just a sweltering mess of OH MY GOD GO TO CLASS and DO YOU WANT TO GET YOUR DUMB ASS MURDERED TOO and IF YOU TALKED ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS NONE OF THIS WOULD HAVE HAPPENED which I guess is a big part of why it has to be about idiot boys instead of idiot girls, even though as an idiot woman I prefer reading about idiot girls. But anyway, these idiot dirt bag druggie boys are adorable and I want to give them all a good talking to. But hey really excellent book about male friendship and relationships and the blurry (ha!) line between homoeroticism and brotherhood.

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caspian_the_pauper's review against another edition

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dark emotional mysterious sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

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booksbeyondthebinary's review against another edition

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dark emotional mysterious medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

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therainbowshelf's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional mysterious tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

I don't know how to review this. I feel like I didn't enjoy it as much as it deserves, though I did enjoy it. I couldn't fully get into Andrew or Sam as characters, so even though the writing was good and I enjoyed the story overall (other than a few things that needed a bit more development toward the end), I feel so-so on it. I also don't love atmospheric books, and this was very atmospheric. This came to me from Rainbow Crate Book Box.

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laguerrelewis's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional mysterious reflective sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

This book is oozing in atmosphere. Lee Mandelo has a way of describing things that cuts right to the heart of the image, transporting you into the story. This skill is employed to great effect in this creepy, tragic southern gothic. A story about haunting, inheritance, personhood, and love in all its fucked up forms, this is a great tale to raise the hair on your neck an leave you with a lot to consider.

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wardenred's review against another edition

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challenging dark mysterious reflective tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

Is there anything in this scenario that feels heterosexual or well-adjusted to you?

Well, this was a trip, and I loved practically every minute. It's a messy story of grief and codependency, and while Andrew isn't the most likable MC I've ever met, to put it mildly, I also found him incredibly relatable. To tell the truth, no character in this book was 100% likable (Riley came closest?), but plenty of them made me feel for them and kept me intrigued. Sam in particular was a great character to follow throughout the story as he revealed more and more of himself, like piling back layers of an onion. And West's subplot, although rather small, was one of my favorite things about the book. And then there's Eddie, who exists in the plot purely as a memory full of contradictions, never to be resolved.

The writing style here really stuck with me. It's incredibly... sensory? Tactile? There's sure a lot of emphasize on bodies—Andrew is constantly aware of his own muscles and bones, and everyone around him—and physical sensations in general. It was interesting to see how the author focused on all the physicality and through that brought emotions to life. I'm usually the opposite, both in how I write and how I perceive the world, and I'm also not a super visual reader, but the prose here really pulled me into the story and the setting and made me experience some scenes as though I were watching a movie.

As for the plot, if I had to describe the story in one word, I'd pick "liminal." Andrew spends pretty much the entire thing stuck between things. The past and the present/future. His memories of Eddie and the true legacy Eddie left him. The orderly cut-throat academic world and the wild freedom of nighttime drives with the bad crowd. The sunlit summer in the real world and the cold land of the ghosts. Grief has a way of trapping you in the moment, in that empty page between chapters, especially when you're grieving someone you had a weird codependent relationship with, doubly so when they abandoned you even before they died, and Mandelo captures the feeling masterfully while also crafting a great southern gothic horror story. There are so many nested secrets here, the mystery Andrew investigates and the one he keeps from the reader, as well as the things he doesn't understand about himself that everyone else does. Also, I'm torn between wanting a sequel, because I so much want to know how Andrew and the people around him fare now that his amber bubble is burst and the next chapter begins, and being completely, utterly, 100% satisfied with the final scene.

For all of my praise, however, there are aspects of the book that won't let me five-star it. For once, the story is incredibly masculine. That in itself isn't a flaw; such stories have their place. But literally all the women in the plot only exist to drive the male characters' storylines further, in a variety of ways. They're pretty much all more plot devices than characters, tools that resolve plot questions, trigger events, or bring forth necessary revelations while exhibiting zero character traits that aren't 100% relevant to their role in the plot. That's a stark and unpleasant contrast to the way more nuanced handling of male characters, and it didn't sit well with me. Like, come on. This has good trans rep, this has decent poly rep that compares and contrasts healthy and unhealthy dynamics in a throuple, but somehow female characters get this odd treatment? Why?

Another part I wasn't fully satisfied with was the dark academia aspect. The academic parts of the book were so often pushed to the curb or just briefly summarized without proper focus, and considering how crucial that part of the story turned out to be for the main plot resolution, that was just... weird. Finally, for me it felt like the author went overboard with all the substance abuse. At some point, all the mentions of drugs and alcohol started feeling like they were just there to make the story darker and edgier.

PS: I'm kind of convinced that Lee Mandelo had my favorite Placebo song (Kings of Medicine) on repeat while writing this, because if not, then how?

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dagsywagsy43's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional mysterious sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

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parasolcrafter's review against another edition

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dark emotional mysterious tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

this book was soooooo good omg omg... i dont have many complaints other than i wish eddie might have played a bigger part in it (hes definitely present all throughout it but its like...an absent kind of presence? if that makes sense) but other than that i thoroughly enjoyed it 💖

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