Sakura of DOOM

After a nuclear apocalypse and subsequent global cooling, the enclosed glass pyramid that is the city of Palmares Tres rises in what used to be Brazil. Palmares Tres is ruled by a queen and Aunties, but every five years, the city elects a Summer King. And at the end of the year, the Summer King is sacrificed as he selects the next queen.

June Costa and her friend Gil are very caught up in the current Summer King elections, and when their favorite candidate Enki wins, Gil and Enki quickly fall in love as June plots with Enki to create politically risky art installations. This sounds like it should be your standard post-apocalyptic YA romance triangle, and it really isn't. Gil and Enki's romance mainly acts as a backdrop to June constantly having to balance social approval against radical art.

I am having a terrible time writing a summary of this. There's June's battle with her desire to win the prestigious Queen's Award while knowing that anything too daring will disqualify her. There's Enki pushing her more and more toward radicalism as he uses his Summer King position to make the city focus on its poorest citizens. There's June's terrible relationship with her mother and stepmother, with the death of her father haunting them. There's the city's anti-technology tendencies in a world where many people have abandoned their bodies to become datastreams. There's the conflict between the wakas (the powerless youth of the city) and the grandes (the non-youth) along with the class conflict June has been too privileged to pay attention to before Enki. And all the layers are so easily intertwined with the others: this is a future city that feels incredibly real and complicated.

I've previously liked but not loved Johnson's books—Racing the Dark felt too crowded and lacking in focus while Moonshine had a great world but too much paranormal-romance-genre-flavored romance for me. The Summer Prince manages to juggle a bit of romance with a lot of worldbuilding, along with a great YA coming of age story that is June coming into her political and artistic own, and it really feels like Johnson has come into her own as a novelist as well.

And all this is ignoring the incredibly powerful narrative of a Summer King's year and the ritual the city was founded with, the choice of mortality and sacrifice and how it impacts everyone in the book.

This is a really good book on so many levels. I love Palmares Tres and the little glimpses we get of the world outside, I love having same-sex relationships casually in the background, I love little things like June's relationship with her rival Bebel and how that unwraps, I love the bits and pieces of Brazil and the South American African diaspora, I love the non-dystopian and non-utopian matriarchy, and I really really love how it's about sociopolitical moral dilemmas and art and expression written in a way that is complicated and difficult and very personal.

Anyway, go read!

Links:
- skygiants' review
- starlady's review

Lana wants most of all to be a diver, like her mother, but soon, changes in the environment mean the death of the mandagah fish whose jewels they harvest, along with the death of her island's lifestyle. Lana is then apprenticed to the witch Akua, and... stuff ensues. Lots of stuff!

I was extremely confused by the pacing of this book. In the beginning, it was because I had this categorized in my mind as a young adult fantasy, which I am not sure it is.* As in, we begin with Lana hitting puberty and going through a rite of adulthood. I had fully expected the book to go into why the mandagah fish were dying and what it meant for Lana, but then the book very quickly moves on to that to greater problems. The mandagah fish are a symptom, but they are not the whole mystery. The POV also switches a fair amount, which also ran counter to my expectations. Again, when I got more used to the book and started thinking of it more as epic fantasy in my head, everything made a lot more sense. I have no idea if this confusion will strike anyone but me, as it feels fairly idiosyncratic...?

Anyway. There is a lot going on in this book!

First of all, I enjoyed the setting a great deal. It's based on Pacific Island cultures, with a smattering of Asian influence (mochi!), and it doesn't feel much like anything I've read before. I also like the magic system, which is based on sacrifice and is approrpiately dark. There are also bound spirits, linked charms, volcanos, and harbingers of DOOM. Everything feels extremely complex and fleshed-out, and I particularly like seeing the differences among the islands and the cities on the islands. There's a whole lot of world in this book, which was a very pleasant surprise.

However, I also had a lot of problems with the book. After I got over my first issue with the pacing, I continued to have other issues with the pacing. The book feels like it skips from moment to moment, not always tying them together. I give it a fair amount of leeway for this, as it's the first of a trilogy and I'm guessing it's setting up a lot of puzzle pieces that will only come together in the final volume. However, I couldn't always find a thread through even the similar pieces, or the plot elements that starred the same characters (ex. Lana going from a diver to a witch apprentice to... something else). As such, it felt like a very disconnected read. I was constantly trying to figure out how much time had passed, where I was, who I was with in terms of the story, and what each character had to do with each other.

This was more pronounced around the end of the book, where we're introduced to several new characters with very little background as to who they are. This wouldn't be as big of an issue if I didn't get the sense that the new characters are going to be fairly important in the next books, and if they didn't have a very close bond with Lana. I felt there wasn't enough time dedicated to that relationship, particularly given how quickly it deepens and how much weight it's given. And there's a giant plot twist that happens about two thirds of the way in which didn't feel adequately forshadowed at all—I think Johnson tried to in the prologue, but we all know what people say about prologues.

One last complaint is that Lana never quite comes together as a character for me. Much of it is because I felt as though she was reacting to things throughout the entire book, from her rite of passage gone awry to her apprenticeship to Akua to what comes later. I didn't see as much of her making her own choices and carving her own path, more deciding what to do with her life based on the circumstances at the time. As such, it was hard getting a feel for her, since I felt like she changed depending on what circumstances she was in.

In conclusion: very rough in terms of pacing and structure, but with a lot of cool ideas in terms of the magic and the setting. And yay POC characters and world! I think it'll be interesting seeing where the trilogy goes from here, since I currently have no idea, and I suspect many of the structural issues will work themselves out once Johnson has written more novels.


* I realize defining "young adult" is an exercise in futility. My personal definition, which I was completely unaware of until this book did not fit and confused me, is that YA has a certain immediacy to it. This can either be in terms of plot, which can span a long time period but feels scarf-down-able and in the moment, or in terms of cast, which tends to be fairly small. Or, uh. Something like that. *handwaves* And of course the coming of age bit, which I think is a part of this book, but not the driving factor.