Opaque, intelligent, breathless, beautiful. The omniscient first person is a unique achievement.Also, this book may hold the record for most bathing/soaking/swimming in anything I've ever read.

Jeanne Thornton's Summer Fun is the trans fiction I have been waiting to read, and I am so glad it is here.Gala is a trans woman living in the New Mexico desert who finds herself with a trans friend, Ronda, who she doesn't really want to be friends with, and a girlfriend, Caroline, who can't quite seem to understand Gala. With the background of these rough-and-tumble queer friendships, Gala tells two stories through letters written to a rock star of old, Diane, a trans woman who tried to be hers...

Genius work with the epistolary form and "you" as a trans pronoun, here constructed to pair both the intimate warmth of direct address and also the protagonist's remove/dissociation. SO GOOD! and painful, and complicated. Beautiful writing. Five stars, infinite hearts.

I'm torn on this one. I think Thornton's writing is beautiful and insightful, and in theory I love the concept of this book: a contemporary aimless trans woman writes letters to the lead of a fictional 60s band leader a la Brian Wilson, whose life turns out to intersect with hers in unforeseen ways. But I had a lot of trouble connecting to any of the characters, although I can't pinpoint why. I feel like others may have a very different experience with this book, especially those with a particul...

It’s hard to say I “loved” this novel - I often found it difficult to stay with but was absolutely wrapped up in it, intensely curious and eager to know more. Summer Fun hangs in a place I’ve never encountered before in a novel, exploring suspended possibilities and suspended disbelief. It’s told exclusively through self-conscious, self-interrogating projection that is also, just as much, an elaborate form of magical ritual. And it leaves the scene whenever our characters seem like they may beco...

i'm surprised this is up this soon, but sure yeah i thought this was okay

As a long time Get Happies fan, I was so pleased to read this new biography by Jeanne Thornton. Wow!

Incredible, decadent, devastating spiral! Especially recommended for fans of non-linear realities, harmonics, and The Get Happies. Feels like walking a mile over hot coals in a dissociative state, the air teeming with the scent of apple blossoms and good vibrations.

Content warnings at the end of my review! I was given an advance reader copy by the author in exchange for an honest review. I’d love to thank Jeanne again for this opportunity! Summer Fun is intensely almost beyond words for me, as this book was packed to the brim with a lavish and complicated world that summaries can’t do a full justice. As I’m writing this, my head is still in a whirl after reading, but it has me wanting to run back and read it all again. Just seeing the premise, following a

Beautiful -- strange and hard and intense and painful and beautiful. Jeanne Thornton pulls off magic tricks.I have one question about something small that I don't think I understood, so if you also read this and know me maybe shoot me a message???

Loved it. I grew up on 60s surf music and one strand of the book is a lovely evocation of that era, and asks what it would be like for a trans woman to survive in that world. That story is bracketed by a trans woman in the 2000s who has an obsession with a certain sixties surf band. That part has one of the best accounts in fiction I've seen of the difficult friendships trans women make with each other when nobody else will have us in their lives. Moving and revealing.

In Lewis Shiner's Glimpses, a man magically gains the ability to imagine music that his favorite classic rock bands might have made but never did. The narrator's fantasies of unrecorded songs by The Doors or The Beach Boys are so vivid that they begin playing out of his stereo until he finally records them to tape and preserves them for history.Jeanne Thornton has the same magical ability to create parallel realities in her new novel, Summer Fun. But in Summer Fun, the unreleased recordings blas...

"I am writing a teenage symphony to God,” Brian Wilson told a group of dinner guests in 1966, referring to SMiLE, a record he was working on that would be the follow-up to Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys. It would become a tortured, legendary record that was discussed far more than it was actually heard; bootlegs were shared, rumors were spread, and it became the greatest rock ‘n’ roll record never made. Without the release of an actual album, the legend became a decades-long repository for imagina...

By the end of 1966, Brian Wilson had already been working on Smile for months. Recording the unfinished album—one of the most infamous in all of rock music history—had been a mired process from the beginning. It was made all the more complicated when Wilson decided to start recording his “Elements” cycle, four songs devoted to earth, water, air, and fire, striving for as much sonic authenticity as possible. When recording the latter element’s song, Wilson had his musicians wear toy fireman’s hat...

This book is bananas! I’m so pleased it exists and really impressed it works. It’s the kind of book where if you described it to someone they’d kind of look askance and be like huh? But it works! Both Gala and the Brian W figure are endearingly human and very different from each other. And it’s a truism but what carries the story is Gala’s cunning, human, very wise voice. She is full of feelings and compassion, you kind of just want to be her friends! I also adored Rhonda and Caroline—it’s actua...

I started Summer Fun in October 2021 and put it down shortly after, just under 30 pages in. Last week, I felt someone calling me back to it—maybe it was Gala and her conjuring—and I had to finish the book.This is among my favorite trans books I have read (next to Nevada) because it is so radically different from the other trans books: it is not primarily trans. But it also is? I can’t describe this book as anything other than a work of genius. Thornton is as good a summoner as Gala, the way she

A powerful work of fiction, Summer Fun is look at B——, leader of a Southern California band called The Get Happies, and while they bear more than a passing resemblance to a Famous Band, it’s less a fictional retelling than a meaningful commentary on fandom, self-expression, trans identity and the power of music. I liked it a lot - could barely put it down. It’s a moving, ultimately bittersweet tale, and Thornton’s prose is dreamy, creating a world that sucks the reader in and makes them feel B——...

Summer Fun is an outstanding novel, and Jeanne is an amazingly talented and inventive storyteller. All of her characters are real, believable and fully formed. I was fully engaged with them the whole way through. I highly recommend this wonderful novel.

This sounded like such an amazing book! And it is, in a way. It sheds some light on things I - and many with me - have not experienced, and on many things I - and many others with me - have experienced (the being obsessed with a band comes so close!). It gets deep into relationships between people, and Gala's relationship with herself.The format was not for me, probably because as I said being obsessed with a band comes so close, and I clearly have some unfinished business with my own insecuriti...

“Got keep those lovin’ good vibrations a-happening”“Good Good Good Good vibrationsShe’s giving me excitation...”Exciting trans literature and a very original novel.