Summer Song by Louise Blaydon

Title: Summer Song
Author: Louise Blaydon
Publisher: Dreamspinner Press
Length:: Novel/201 pgs/79k
Buy the book: Publisher

Blurb:
Billy Bronner is, to all appearances, every inch the 1950s American dream: handsome, clever, captain of the high school football team, looks good enough in tight jeans that people can even forget he’s Jewish. Then the new guy on the block, the enigmatic Leonard Nachman, turns his head, and over the summer Billy discovers a new world of romance and love—in a man’s arms.

But when Kit O’Reilly, Billy’s best friend and shadow, comes home after spending the summer with relatives, he finds Billy acting… differently. Soon enough, it becomes obvious that this change is related to Len, and Kit will have to decide if he’ll accept the relationship Billy and Len have forged, or if he’ll push Billy and their longtime friendship away.

Review:
Christopher “Kit” O’Reilly has been best friends with Billy Bronner for nearly thirteen years. He knows Billy better than anyone else in town, even if everyone thinks Billy walks on water. But when they start their senior year, something’s different. Kit has been gone all summer, and the Billy he comes back to is more distanced than he’d been in the past. He quickly discovers it has something to do with the new kid in school, Leonard Nachman. Billy claims they had a fight, but Kit learns the two hung out together for most of the summer, and begins to fear Leonard has replaced him as Billy’s best friend. Jealousy rears its ugly head, but there’s little Kit can do about it, especially after he finds out the truth of what really is going on.

Set in a small coastal California town in 1955, this YA novel is told in alternating 1st person POVs, beginning with Kit, and then switching to Leonard, Billy, and even Caitlyn, Kit’s girlfriend. It’s a fresh approach to a young man’s sexual discovery, both because of the time period involved and because it concentrated as equally on the friendships involved as it did the romance. The author’s prose is dynamic and invigorating, even in the multiple POVs, and this goes a long way in creating such a memorable, enjoyable reading experience.

As an emotional experience, however, I have a mixed reaction. I adore 1st person narratives, because they play straight into how I read. I’m very immersive. When a story or a voice is done well, I sink into the character. It’s why I have difficulties with authors that headhop, because I dislike that jolt that comes from being yanked out of one person’s head and into another’s. My interest in reading this sprang from the absolutely phenomenal voice I read in the excerpt on the publisher’s page. It’s the first chapter, told from Kit’s POV, and it’s so vital, so real, I completely disregarded the facts that I don’t care for YA and that I often find historicals dry. I was that sucked in by Kit and his confused emotions as he tries to figure out what’s going on with Billy. Color me a little surprised, then, when in chapter four, the POV shifts to Leonard’s diary, and then to Billy’s POV in chapter five. Each voice is distinctly different, which is a credit to the author’s skill, but I’ll be honest. I didn’t have the same reaction to any other character’s POV in the entire novel. I found myself reading more on the surface whenever I was in a perspective other than Kit’s, unable to get deep into the emotions of either Leonard or Billy like 1st person should allow. I was the most emotionally invested in Kit and Billy’s friendship than I ever was with the romance or sex, and every time it jumped to them – while it afforded me more depth to what was going on – I yearned to get back to Kit and how he was going to deal with everything. I suspect my commitment to Kit is due to a combination of my passion for his particular voice, and the fact the first three chapters are in his POV. I was firmly entrenched in him before any of the others came along, and it very well could have colored my overall reactions.

As characters, I just never felt that I got to know either Billy or Leonard as well as I did Kit. Yes, I identified best with Kit, but Billy is idealized by everyone else in the book. He’s adored and respected by everybody, and it’s difficult to get a true bead on him, even when we’re in his POV. His POV voice rambled in ways Kit didn’t, and his feelings never seem as urgent. Leonard suffers in the same regard, this enigmatic figure that didn’t really leap off the page for me for much of the story. Again, though, that’s likely a result of how everybody else in the book views him, including Kit. The one time I actually felt far more attached to both of them was during the whole sequence where Leonard is researching sodomy, and his attempts to introduce Billy to it. Those couple chapters stood out from all the rest as warm, funny, sexy, and emotional, as the rest of the chapters did not.

I enjoyed the setting quite a bit, but occasional historical inaccuracies pulled me out of the moment. There aren’t a lot, but they do occur, one even on the first page when Kit refers to expensive nonstick frying pans. Teflon wasn’t approved by the FDA in the US until 1960, so those pans would not have been available until 1961, six years after the story’s start. Probably because this one happened so early in the book, I was more alert to the possibility throughout the entire story (like the use of “passive-aggressive,” a term coined by the military in 1945; I had problems believing a teenaged boy would be familiar enough with it during a time of limited information access to throw it about so casually). Some readers might not even notice them, or be willing to excuse them away, but they did lessen my overall commitment to the time period.

All that being said, because of how much I truly loved Kit, and felt for his dilemma throughout the entire story, and because the world itself is vivid and fresh, I have no problems recommending this. Even those not necessarily interested in the YA angle might enjoy it. The sex scenes are explicit and occasionally quite hot, which makes it as much of an erotic romance with high school seniors as the primary love interests as it is about discovering self-identity.