Review: Cool for the Summer by Dahlia Adler
Cool for the Summer follows Lara, a high school senior who just spent a summer having a whirlwind situationship with her mom's boss's daughter, Jasmine. Now she's back in school, and the boy she had a crush on for basically forever finally is into her back. But, Jasmine from the summer is the new student after having not spoken to Lara since they left her father's summer home.
I think this book does an excellent job of having lots of casual queer representation. There are lots of secondary and tertiary characters who occupy various queer identities. There are gay, bi, nonbinary, and asexual characters who are populating this world. Lara's relationship with these people factors into her own journey to realizing she is queer. One of the most interesting parts of this story was watching Lara compare her own experience of her sexuality to others' experiences and try to figure out where she fit.
On to aspects of this story I enjoied less. I found the book really tough to get into in the first 30%, mostly because I really didn't mesh with he writing style. I think this is partly just because it is YA and I am 28 but I did really find the book grating and hard to get through, if I hadn't listened to an audiobook I would not have finished this book. I also didn't like how sometimes the way characters talked about food and body image stuff was pretty toxic but was never addressed in the narrative, these aspects alleviate in the second half of the book, but they would make me feel weird about recommending this book to a teen.
I am divided about how I feel about Lara's school friend group. I do think on the whole their characters were underdeveloped, and we heard so much about how amazing the group was as friends but didn't actually get to see them supporting each other on page very often. Most of what is actually on page is slightly toxic group dynamics that are never addressed. Lara's primary friend in the group, Shannon, is always being thought about but is hardly actually on page. Shannon does mess up twice in the course of the book, and she admits her mistakes and apologizes for those two incidents (one happens literally seconds after her first apology). I do really love that Adler showed friends who were open to apologizing to each other, and showed a friend saying something kind of rude while Lara is coming out and showed that friend being able to realize her mistake and apologize. But, even with all of that, there was so much outside of these interactions that I wanted to be addressed that just wasn't.
I've also seen a lot of reviews that don't like that the author names the race of minor characters, I am very confused by this critique. Authors should be explicit that their books are not exclusively populated by white people. I think the critique of this is coming from a really weird place, when authors don't say what race people are, most readers default to whiteness. Adler had a white main character, but the rest of her cast was explicitly noted to be a broad group of people, I don't know why this is being noted as negative. Especially from other white reviewers.
I don't know that I will personally read anything else by Dahlia Adler, but I am glad I read this one.
I gave this book three stars.
