How to Servive a Summer: First-to-Read Review

 Disclaimer: I won a free copy of this book from www.firsttoread.com. This review is also posted on www.goodreads.com

Will "Rooster" Dillard was one of several teenage boys at a camp to "cure" their homosexuality, tortured until one of them ended up dead. The survivors, years later, have tried to put the experience behind them, made difficult by one of the camp counselors writing a book. And then a movie is made from the book, controversial and one everyone is talking about. The past entwines with the present, and the different viewpoints of the people who were there--two of them have gotten their chance to tell the story, and now it's finally Will's turn. As you might expect, this a bit of a sad story at its core. Will, especially, wanted to be "cured" to please his preacher father, and the struggles of his youth are pretty painful. But his present is a different story, when he's found some acceptance of himself, and finally facing his past helps him move past his issues and find happiness in his future. That hope carries you along through the worst of it, though it's still a bit ambiguous in regards to the movie. The purpose behind it, after all the talking, seems to be more plot related than having anything deeper.

This feels to me like a semi-autobiographical first novel where the author maybe needed some more emotional distance from the subject matter before he decided to write about it. White does a good job of capturing the feeling of a time and place, but the story and character development felt undercooked to me. Turning real life events into a novel using a first-person narrator who's basically a stand-in for the author is such a go-to for young writers but is so hard to get right. This is a good start but I'd like to see what White can do with different subject matter.

♥♥♥♥♥
5 hearts: Doesn't particularly light any of my fires; I feel indifferent about this book (x)
C = This book is okay, and I finished it relatively quickly. It didn't blow me away, and something was definitely lacking (characters, plot, dialogue, etc.)