There's a particular thematic note in this book that still has my stomach roiling with angry acids: as a queer person of color, you really cannot rely on your white queer peers to understand the shape of your chafing and grappling against institutionalized racism, no matter how well-intentioned they are/claim to be. Mandelo doesn't flinch away from pointing out how their (white) characters thoughtlessly perpetuate the problem, through horrifically powerful gullibility or just callous apathy. More important, this book hugely impressed me with its deliberate indictment of the racism baked into academic structures, an aspect that is too-often conveniently omitted by writers dabbling in the "dark academia" sub-genre. The slow-burn is real, and I lived for it. I felt, moreover, compelled by the delicious and increasingly fraught tensions crisscrossing the cast of characters. Summer Sons seduced me with its promise of spooky times and long stretches of repressed miserable queer longings and subsequently hooked me-line and sinker-with the clarity of its prose, the gorgeous character work, and the musings on vampiric love and inheritance and masculinity and all the bleak many-faceted enormities of grief.
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