Chapter One Hundred Fifty-Three: The Summer Prince

Alaya Dawn Johnson's first book, The Summer Prince, is set in a fictitious far-future post-nuclear fallout enclosed city in what in our time is Brazil.  This book takes some of the best elements of post-apocalyptic and dystopian teen fiction and includes them suggestively, without being too overbearing or heavy-handed.   (Not to say that some dystopian elements are not obvious and brutal, in the post-Hunger Games tradition: a main plot point is that, every five years, the city elects a king who will be sacrificed at the end of a one-year term.)  Numerous minor and fascinating details about some of this future society's rules are slipped in throughout the text, helping create a very textured and realistic world, or at least the city of Palmares Três feels very realistic--the rest of the world is tantalizingly vague, which makes sense since the protagonist, June, has never left her glass-pyramid enclosed home city.  And as for June, she reads like many teenage characters do: passionate, creative, intelligent, and very angry with her mother (largely due to the death of her father) and lashing out at her new step-mother, too.  Her anguished relationship with her mother feels just a bit overblown and tired--haven't we seen this before in teen literature?--but the saving grace is that June's relationship with her mother is (slightly) dynamic, and June at least sometimes engages in self-reflexive thinking about her anger at and relationship with her mother, leading to some growth.  Another aspect of this book that I appreciated was its natural inclusion of a diverse array of characters, which can be hard to find in popular literature.

One of my library science/children's literature classmates recommended this book to me, and I'm so glad I took the recommendation and read it.  I could hardly bear to put it down because it kept me guessing until the end, and I would heartily recommend it.  Readers who enjoyed Lois Lowry's The Giver (and sequels), Suzanne Collins's Hunger Games trilogy, M.T. Andersen's Feed, or similar books will probably especially enjoy The Summer Prince by Alaya Dawn Johnson, or if you are looking for a way into the teen dystopian/post-apocalyptic adventure novel, this would be an excellent starting point.