From acclaimed author Jeanne Thornton, an epic, singular look at fandom, creativity, longing, and trans identity.
Gala, a young trans woman, works at a hostel in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. She is obsessed with the Get Happies, the quintessential 1960s Californian band, helmed by its resident genius, B----. Gala needs to know: Why did the band stop making music? Why did they never release their rumored album, Summer Fun?
And so she writes letters to B---- that shed light not only on the Get Happies, but paint an extraordinary portrait of Gala. The parallel narratives of B---- and Gala form a dialogue about creation—of music, identity, self, culture, and counterculture.
Summer Fun is a brilliant and magical work of trans literature that marks Thornton as one of our most exciting and original novelists.
Genre: General Fiction
Gala, a young trans woman, works at a hostel in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. She is obsessed with the Get Happies, the quintessential 1960s Californian band, helmed by its resident genius, B----. Gala needs to know: Why did the band stop making music? Why did they never release their rumored album, Summer Fun?
And so she writes letters to B---- that shed light not only on the Get Happies, but paint an extraordinary portrait of Gala. The parallel narratives of B---- and Gala form a dialogue about creation—of music, identity, self, culture, and counterculture.
Summer Fun is a brilliant and magical work of trans literature that marks Thornton as one of our most exciting and original novelists.
Genre: General Fiction
Praise for this book
"In Summer Fun, Jeanne Thornton, that slow-burn superstar, has dropped a punk’s pop masterpiece—a compulsively readable novel that somehow also reinvigorates the form of the epistolary novel, dives into the deepest reflective waters of fandom, observes trans-cis relations with social-realist precision and generosity, and recovers the trans throughline that was always there. We are so lucky to live now, when we get to read this book." - Andrea Lawlor
"Jeanne Thornton is a sorceress of a writer and, like the ritual at the heart of this book, Summer Fun is a singular and compassionate act of imaginative magic. A feast of contradictions at once funny and painful, tender and scathing, patriotic and radical, Summer Fun contains generations; our country; a world." - Rachel Lyon
"I anticipated the release of Summer Fun for six years, and now that I finally got to read it, its characters and story will linger with me much longer than that. I suspect it will come to be considered the Pet Sounds of trans literature: a masterpiece that feels both astonishingly new and comfortingly familiar." - Torrey Peters
"A beautiful, mesmerizing volcano of a novel that elegantly vibrates with the intimate weight of decades. Thornton's prose is driving, joyous, and steeped with a grace reminiscent of Marilynne Robinson. It all builds to an ending that is no less than perfect. This book made me cry." - Casey Plett
"There is no way to prepare for Summer Fun; we can only submit to Thornton's surreal, captivating and startlingly sui generis world. Summer Fun is a fully realized vision so strange and compelling that even in writing this blurb I still can't quite shake the sensation of having genuinely known these characters, if only for a short and magical while." - Jordy Rosenberg
"Jeanne Thornton is a sorceress of a writer and, like the ritual at the heart of this book, Summer Fun is a singular and compassionate act of imaginative magic. A feast of contradictions at once funny and painful, tender and scathing, patriotic and radical, Summer Fun contains generations; our country; a world." - Rachel Lyon
"I anticipated the release of Summer Fun for six years, and now that I finally got to read it, its characters and story will linger with me much longer than that. I suspect it will come to be considered the Pet Sounds of trans literature: a masterpiece that feels both astonishingly new and comfortingly familiar." - Torrey Peters
"A beautiful, mesmerizing volcano of a novel that elegantly vibrates with the intimate weight of decades. Thornton's prose is driving, joyous, and steeped with a grace reminiscent of Marilynne Robinson. It all builds to an ending that is no less than perfect. This book made me cry." - Casey Plett
"There is no way to prepare for Summer Fun; we can only submit to Thornton's surreal, captivating and startlingly sui generis world. Summer Fun is a fully realized vision so strange and compelling that even in writing this blurb I still can't quite shake the sensation of having genuinely known these characters, if only for a short and magical while." - Jordy Rosenberg
Used availability for Jeanne Thornton's Summer Fun