Andrew and Eddie were best friends. When Eddie dies Andrew in his grief seeks to find answers into the death of his friend. Between the ghosts and the legacy that Eddie leaves him can Andrew escape or will he be consumed as well? I spent much of this book confused because I couldn't tell if Andrew's grief clouded his judgement or if the mysterious happenings around him were parts of his grieving process. I enjoyed this story so much it was a tragic tale with a real mystery and supernatural presence that kept me guessing from page 1.

2.5 Stars

This book follows Andrew who moves to Nashville following the apparent suicide of his best friend, Eddie. Andrew inherits Eddie's fortune, house, car, and also his roommate.
Months pass as Andrew searches for the truth of Eddie's death and uncovers much more than he bargained for.
I enjoyed the LGBT+ aspect of the story and how Andrew learned about himself along the way.
The setting was atmospheric and the car racing was a unique side story.
However, the plot of this book did not move fast enough. It took about 60% before the book went in an interesting direction. The "phantom" aspect of this story was lost on me most of the time and I did not know what was happening.

The ending was also lackluster. The "reveal" did not shock me.

The nitty-gritty: Despite a couple of intriguing mysteries and an atmospheric setting, Summer Sons ended up being a disappointing read.

The description and early blurbs for Summer Sons promised a queer, spooky, Southern Gothic ghost story, and the creepy cover made it even more appealing to me. And while it’s unabashedly queer and creepy and atmospheric at times, unfortunately it just didn’t work for me. 

Andrew was supposed to join his best friend Eddie in Nashville to attend Vanderbilt University, but before he can make the move, Eddie is found dead of an apparent suicide. Andrew arrives at the house Eddie was living in—the house they were going to share—only to discover that a student named Riley is already living there. Heartbroken and overwhelmed by Eddie’s death, and the fact that Eddie left Andrew his seven million dollar inheritance, Andrew is convinced that Eddie would never take his own life, and that there must be another explanation.

With the help of Riley and his cousin Sam, Andrew begins to dig into Eddie’s last moments, hoping to learn the truth. But when an angry spirit who appears to be Eddie starts haunting him, his investigation takes a terrifying turn. 

Where to start. I’m afraid this is going to be a mostly negative review, which I know is unusual for me. The story has so much potential to be great, but it falls short in many ways. I loved the idea of a malevolent ghost, and the author really nails the feeling of danger every time Andrew is haunted by Eddie’s spirit. Despite their relationship when Eddie was alive, Eddie's ghost seems angry and even ends up physically hurting Andrew. There’s a feeling of claustrophobia during these scenes that really creeped me out. However, for a book pitched as a ghost story, there really isn’t that much page time with Eddie the spirit, and I would have loved more.

One of the ongoing mysteries involves a traumatic event that happened to Eddie and Andrew when they were kids. Mandelo refers to this event in brief, tantalizing spurts, but doesn’t reveal what actually happened to the boys until the end, and even then his explanation was rather vague and unsatisfying. The result of this event leaves both boys with the ability to sense and see ghosts, and I thought that was such an intriguing idea. But like many of the better elements in this story, it just wasn’t utilized enough.

I had hoped for more of the “dark academia” trope too, and sadly that element fell flat as well. Andrew is expected to take up Eddie’s unfinished research into local Southern folklore, and when he arrives he’s expected to show up to classes, do the work, and have regular sessions with Eddie’s faculty mentor, Dr. Troth. While there was an interesting mystery involving Eddie’s missing journal and research notes, Andrew is much more focused on finding these items—as well as Eddie’s missing cell phone—than actually going to class. He blows off his advisor meetings and classes, and really, who can blame him? He’s trying to figure out who murdered his best friend!

Unfortunately, the story has many elements that didn’t really interest me, and less of these and more of the ghost would have made it better in my opinion. What are these elements? Street racing, lots of drugs, lots of alcohol, lots of sexual tension (and I do mean LOTS), gender identity and sexual orientation issues and plenty of angst. Most of the characters are male, so the testosterone is off the charts. A couple of female characters round out the cast but they don’t do much: a token girlfriend, Andrew’s ex who’s pissed off at him about something (and is only in the story, as far as I can tell, to help Andrew figure out his sexuality), and the evil professor Dr. Troth. I didn’t understand why the street racing element was even needed. I feel like it was added to make the characters seem “bad,” along with all the drinking, drugs and sex.

All of these negatives would have been ok if the pacing and writing had been better, but here’s where the story really fell apart for me. Summer Sons is slow. And I mean it develops at a snail’s pace. The fact that it took me three weeks to finish also tells you something. I found I was forcing myself to read it, and I almost DNF’d it several times but in the end decided to push through. There are bursts of excitement and danger scattered throughout, but in between those moments are excruciatingly slow and repetitious sections that killed all those thrilling scenes.

And I’m sorry to say that Lee Mandelo’s writing did not work for me at all. The story is overwritten and flowery and frankly, confusing as hell. Many times I got hung up on sentences that didn’t make any sense and pulled me out of the story. Now I know I read an uncorrected proof, and it’s entirely possible some of these have been edited by now, but I doubt that’s the case. Here are a couple of cringe-worthy examples: 

Their delicate dance of implication and tradition remained alien to him, and it pulled the air out of the room.

and

The question flew into the wall of Andrew’s privacy like a bird into glass and dropped dead.

I haven’t even touched on the characters, and to be honest, I’m sort of ready to end this review. Let’s just say that I didn’t like any of them, even Andrew. I did appreciate what Mandelo was trying to do with gender and sexual identity, but it became the focus of the story, and that just wasn’t the story I wanted to read. Many readers seem to love Summer Sons, so I suppose I might be the odd man out, but ultimately this wasn’t the right book for me.

With thanks to the publisher for providing a review copy.

I found it at times hard to keep track of the storyline. This made it hard to genuinely enjoy the book. Lots going on and overall, it was good. I did it as an audiobook and this could be why?

I had to DNF this book. It's disappointing because I've been looking forward to this book for months and was so thankful for being given an advanced ebook copy from Netgalley and the publisher of Summer Sons. As much as I tried, and I even bought the audio book to help me continue, I just could not get into this story. Because I could not finish it, I am giving it 2 ⭐.

Eddie and Andrew are childhood friends that have an unbreakable bond. They do everything together up until Eddie leaves to start his graduate program. After 6 months Andrew is notified that Eddie has committed suicide and has left him a home with an unknown roommate and more questions than answers. He cannot accept Eddie's death as a suicide and begins to retrace his steps by spending time partying with his friends and looking into the research project he was working on. Andrew's life begins to unravel as a mysterious entity with slashed wrists starts to appear.

I really liked the concept and the setting of the story. It had some really creepy elements and the repressed feelings that Andrew had were also an interesting part of the story. The ending felt a little flat to me. I was hoping for a little more.

This book is going on my "pandemic DNF- return to someday" list. It's definitely a me-not-you sort of DNF, as I just couldn't focus on the story despite the fact that it is quite well written and up my alley.

I seem to be in the minority here but something about this didn't work for me. I just could not get into the writing style. This did not feel like horror to me, even though there were depictions of ghosts and other "horror" type things. I just felt a little detached because of the writing style.

Thank You So Much Tordotcom for this ebook! 😘

Andrew and Eddie are the best of friends! They are more like brothers!
Eddie left to go-to Vanderbilt.
Andrew was to join him in Nashville a few months later.
Now Andrew is dead from an apparent suicide!
Eddie wouldn't kill himself.... So Andrew sets out to find the truth.
He is determined to find out what happened. So he retraces his steps.

Summer Sons intrigued me from the very beginning.
Its spooky, dark and beyond errie!
It’s a thrilling and fascinating read the whole way through.
This beautiful cover is one pro....
But Lee Mandelo does an outstanding job making his characters come straight to life!
I simply adored every aspect of it: the writing, the angst, the pace, the characters!
This is one book you should read!

Well, I really enjoyed this one.

I just tell you that I was much more into the drama and the relationship than I was into the horror/paranormal aspect of it. Don't get me wrong, that was good - it's just that I really needed our main character to find himself and some semblance of happy.

The Gothic feel of the piece is well done and our boys are so, so dangerous in so many ways.

Well written and made me very, very anxious!

This book has everything I love: dark academia, an unsolved murder with a paranormal mystery, complex characters you can’t help but love, and a creepy, atmospheric setting.

Summer Sons follows Andrew, who travels to Vanderbilt University to investigate the apparent suicide of his childhood best friend Eddie. Torn apart with grief, Andrew knows that Eddie couldn’t have done that, and continue’s Eddie’s PhD research on local folklore in order to figure out what happened. But with the revenant Eddie haunting him, will Andrew be able to solve the mystery before it consumes him?

I loved this book so much. It was the exact dark, weird, slowburn horror that I adore. Andrew was an equally compelling and frustrating main character, but I really felt with him as he processed the loss of his best friend and the unresolved feelings between the two. I also adored the paranormal elements of the book and thought it was really unique. I definitely need to look for more southern gothic books because this was so so good.

Side note but I think this would be really good for fans of The Raven Cycle that are looking for similar dark paranormal vibes. This book reminded me a lot of the Dream Thieves and is the first time I’ve been able to find something similar to my favorite series.

Overall this was a perfect mixture of dark academia and southern gothic and I highly recommend picking it up this fall!

Thanks so much to Tordotcom and NetGalley for the digital review copy!

Not sure what I can say that hasn't already been said: this book is sweaty, delicious, terrifying, unputdownable.

The deeply descriptive prose and lush setting of this book draw you in until you can almost smell the burnt rubber of a street race and feel the oppressive heat of summer.
I did struggle with the characters a bit because while they’re very well-written they’re also mostly terrible people and I had a difficult time identifying with Andrew at all. I also felt like the writing at times was too heavy with metaphors and it detracted from what was actually going on in the story.
Overall I feel like this was an intriguing, slow burn, atmospheric gothic mystery that I would definitely recommend to anyone who is looking for a good ghost story.

This books writing is unlike anything I've ever read. Mandelo has incredible story telling skills. As well as amazing plot development. I loved this book!

I don't normally give out a five star rating for a book unless its both technically perfect AND hits some key points/feelings that are often indescribable for me personally. The fifth star, for me, is something that is deeply personal and so I never argue when another reader and I are on the 4/5 split. So I struggled a bit with what to give this one. It is a technically perfect work of art. Stunning prose; full characters who feel like real, breathing people; rich, complex relationships; and a story that manages to be beautifully atmospheric while not sacrificing pace all come together with a tight, fitting ending.

This book is everything it promises to be and more and I genuinely cannot recommend it enough. It is a rare book indeed where, just 100 pages in, I was telling people "you need to preorder this right now."

But, for me, I know a book hits that "indescribable" point when I want to turn it over and start again the moment I read the last few words. Here, the first time through, the book felt so nostalgic (growing up in the same area, having several similar life experiences) that finishing it for the first time felt like reading a beloved tale for the nth time. That's something I don't think I've ever been able to say about a book before, but the way Mandelo captures the utter southerness of their location, there feels like no other way to describe it. The characters felt like people so real they were about to walk of the page and the location was just as palpable.

This book has a LOT of praise points (I honestly tried to think of something nitpicky I could say about it - came up empty). but how Mandelo manages to write the early 20s/LGBTQ experience in a way that feels deeply ordinary and familiar while also weaving in an incredibly unique ghost story that manages to feel fresh AND timeless at the same time?

That is just unquestionable talent.

I don't think I've ever been so excited to see what a debut author does next.

I finished Summer Sons by Lee Mandelo a few days ago and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since. This debut novel is a beautifully queer, Southern Gothic look into the world of Appalachian street racing and higher learning.
Summer Sons focuses on Andrew and Eddie, two friends with an intense, unexplainable bond as they move on to their graduate program at Vanderbilt. Eddie decides to go first, asking Andrew to stay behind for a few months. When Eddie dies by apparent suicide, he learns that Eddie has left him his considerable fortune, a house with a roommate he doesn’t want, his extensive thesis research, and a vengeful haunt that will not leave him alone. He also leaves him the mystery of his demise, which Andrew knows was not suicide. In order to solve this mystery, Andrew must assimilate into Eddie’s life, diving headfirst into a world of fast cars, blurred sexual identities, and copious amounts of drugs.
If that sounds like a lot thematically, it is but it somehow works. Mandelo is an amazing writer who manages to tackle huge themes like wealth inequality and toxic masculinity in the middle of what is, in essence, a ghostly unrequited love story. I am particularly impressed by his searing indictment of the casual racism of the academic world, especially in the South. I read a lot of dark academia and this is a topic usually skirted around or wholly ignored, so I appreciate the inclusion. I also love the way Mandelo handles the dual nature of human beings. Every character is incredibly nuanced, always encompassing more than one thing at a time, which is realistic and beautiful.
Summer Sons is one of the best books I can remember reading. I absolutely loved every minute of it and cannot wait to see what Mandelo comes up with next. I'd give this one more than 5 stars if I could.

Andrew is getting ready to join his best friend, when he instead learns of his apparent suicide. Now everything Eddie owned belongs to Andrew except for the knowledge of what really happened. Andrew knew Eddie better than anyone else in the world and he is positive that he never would have killed himself.
It took me a while to get into this story. The pace was slow at first, although I was immediately knocked over by the depth of Andrew's grief at the loss of his friend Eddie. As Andrew moves into what was once Eddie's house and now belongs to him, I didn't really care for his inherited roommate Riley or really any of Eddie's crowd. They grew on me eventually and by the time I realized I was angry with Eddie for having shared what Andrew thought was private, I was pretty heavily invested in Andrew's search for the truth of what really led to Eddie's death and whether he really took his own life. There is a supernatural element involved but it felt secondary to Andrew's grief and repressed sexuality. If you enjoy a slow burn horror this is for you.

4 out of 5 stars

Part mystery, part creepy Southern Gothic ghost story, part dark academia, part an exploration of queer masculinity and grief, Summer Sons was like nothing else I ever read. I wasn’t sure if it’d be up my alley, I don’t go for horror, and the ARC request was of the experimental why-the-hell-not-my-friends-like-it kind, but damn it was good. I picked it up at exactly the right time.

Andrew is in pieces after his childhood best friend Eddie suddenly died. He knows that what looks like a suicide isn’t and, haunted by Eddie’s ghost, sets off to follow his steps at university, meet his friends, and find out what really happened.

Also, he might be into guys without knowing it yet.

The story starts off fairly slow. Andrew’s idea of investigating is drinking, doing drugs, racing, getting acquainted with Eddie’s friends, avoiding talking about his feelings, and doing the bare minimum of Eddie’s schoolwork he was supposed to be following up on. His discovery of his sexuality is even slower because he’s an oblivious moron (oh, do we love to see it). But slowly and all the more surely, the story drew me in until I read the last part in one go.

I thought I wouldn’t be too into it because horror, but it’s so character-focused and queer in a messy and unlabelled way it ended up being very much to my liking. The atmosphere is spot on, it’s quotable as hell, and I loved the side characters, especially Riley aka the one sane person. I also found it interesting how, for the lack of a better world, masculine it is – fistfights, racing, cheap beer, and all.

All in all, I’d highly recommend you give it a try.

This book was the definition of a slow burn investment for me. At first I wasn't sure how I would feel because the pacing is pretty slow as Andrew gets acclimated to his new setting and grieving over the loss of his best friend but as the story progressed I found this slow start really allowed me to connect to these characters in a way I wouldn't have been able to if it were a more traditionally fast paced mystery dark academia book. I was pleasantly surprised by the fast and furious vibes and the relationship developments between characters and was always itching to read it when I wasn't. In general I think the setting was not my favorite to be in, since as a reader I am not generally drawn to this dark, toxic settings but besides that personal preference I am really glad I picked this one up and would recommend it to anyone looking for a new dark academia that focuses on toxic masculinity, and queer identity with southern gothic vibes.

Summer Sons is a howl in the dark. It’s southern, but in the way you only notice near dusk, when blue lightning bugs come out and dance in tandem. It’s got pollen in its throat, sweat in its eyes, and a trucker hat on backwards. Summer Sons rips itself out of Appalachian places—Tennessee lowlands, Georgia high country, Kentucky caves—and offers its men up on a platter, daring you to taste.

Written by Kentucky resident Lee Mandelo, the book takes place at Vanderbilt University, a very well-to-do school in Nashville, Tennessee that’s got enough prestige and culture to impress rich parents who don’t want to send their kids past the Mason-Dixon. In this privileged setting, a young man, Eddie Fulton, has been found dead in the woods. The police have ruled it a suicide, but Andrew Blur—Eddie’s best friend and foster brother—knows that there’s more to it than that.

After all, Andrew and Eddie are cursed. Revealed in bits and pieces throughout the book, when the two boys were kids they were trapped for days in a cave. While there, their bleeding injuries awakened a magical ghoul that has haunted them their entire lives. Andrew has tried to run from his revenant, but Eddie embraced it, trying to figure out what it wanted and how to control it.

While the two men might have haunted blood, Andrew is sure that his foster brother wouldn’t commit suicide. Despite warnings from his family and friends to drop it, Andrew undertakes an investigation to figure out what really happened to Eddie. From the nosy thesis supervisor to the rough-and-tumble townies, Andrew finds himself caught up in the relationships that Eddie left behind. None of this is made easier by the fact that Andrew’s curse seems to have come back with a vengeance, taking the guise of a skeletal, rotting revenant that feels, in some eerie way, like Eddie.

As the mystery unfolds, so do details of Andrew and Eddie’s relationship. While they did grow up together, first as friends, and then as foster siblings after Eddie’s parents died, there was always a tension between them, a kind of casual intimacy that might have developed into something more. Andrew tries to push down his more complicated feelings as he begins to unspool the mystery surrounding Eddie’s death. While they were never physically intimate, everyone in Eddie’s old circle seems to think that Andrew was Eddie’s boyfriend. And Andrew refuses to think about what their relationship could have been. In the middle of this southern setting, a gripping coming-out story reveals itself as Andrew comes to terms with his relationship, or lack of a relationship, with his dead best friend.

It feels unfair to compare Summer Sons to another book, but this novel is the meaner, adult version of the heat wave of southern boyhood brought on by the Raven Cycle. (Although considering Mandelo’s four-part series on Stiefvater’s seminal tetralogy, maybe this comparison is earned.) What so many fans latched onto in that series—the smoky sense of identity that swirls around queers in the rural south, the stickiness of growing up with and without privilege, the magic of low hollers and unknown woods—is given its full herald in Summer Sons. Relying on some very slant Appalachian folklore, this book is a thoroughly modern novel, keeping pace with contemporary work and leaving behind the old stories of Silver John and murder ballads. The book muses on dark academia, but focuses on the living that happens outside of the classroom. There’s street racing and half-attempted threesomes, murder, and ghosts. The prose is centered around grisly details, and these are the parts that stand out beyond any others—those moments when the undead revenant comes to collect.

There is also a grief fantasy at work here. Death by suicide is often difficult to conceptualize, and fighting to find “the truth” of a tragedy is a universal desire. All around Andrew, people attempt to convince him that his friend did take his own life. Andrew, by way of supernatural revenant, knows things that nobody else knows. He gets to play out the fantasy of finding Eddie’s truth among the clues left behind. So often in the real world people are left to struggle on their own, without any explanations. Andrew becomes a vessel through which the audience can fantasize about closure and grief, where the audience can experience a catharsis through simply knowing what happened to a loved one before they died.

While Andrew struggles with his suspicions surrounding Eddie’s official manner of death, he also, very simply, struggles with what was lost. The complicated feelings he has about what did or didn’t happen between himself and his best friend/foster brother are exceptionally poignant moments within Summer Sons. This mourning keeps us grounded in the plot, even amid the leisurely first half of the book. All we can feel is bad for Andrew. All we can do is sympathize.

But, the plot continues. While Andrew obsesses over his relationship to Eddie, he has to rely on his inherited roommate Riley—and Riley’s cousin Sam Halse—to help him figure out just how deep Eddie was in the shit. It’s Andrew’s friendship with Sam, the kind of southern man you love to hate, that becomes the pulsing, bloody heartbeat of this book.

Sam Halse is every boy I knew in my small, rural, southern high school. The kind with tattoos and a bad attitude, who nobody fucked with, but whom everyone got fucked up with. The boy who comes late to his own party, half a forty already down. He’s the boy who soups up his car but lives without air conditioning, installs custom lights, and learns about racing the old-fashioned way—by outdriving cops in the night, turning off his headlights to careen down winding southern roads, a rogue deer standing in between life, death, and jail time.

Maybe this is one of the reasons why I loved Summer Sons. I knew these boys. I wanted to fight these boys. I wanted to be these boys. Some of them I might have even wanted to fuck.

The exploration of masculinity in Summer Sons is almost fetishistic. Masculinity is captured and held up to the light, observed like a moth near a fire. It’s something to desire, to look away from, to aspire towards. The women in Summer Sons are side characters, meant to aid the development of the men, ignored with the swipe of a finger as Andrew screens their calls. When they do enter the scene they are as fully fleshed out as any other character, but (with one exception) they don’t cling to the page, don’t demand to be known in the way that the men do. As we press against the edges of men, they break under Mandelo’s prose, eviscerated in parts and in whole, haunted by the specters of expectation and attitudes.

Underneath this exploration of masculinity and manhood lies the haunting. The magic in this book is distant and immediate at the same time. It simply appears; it is not controlled. It is otherworldly and not easily understood. The ghost at the center of Summer Sons is born in blood and terror, and it latches itself to ribs, sticky and wet, muddy and angry.

Inside this conclave of heat and horror, a truly wonderful novel plays out. The line-writing, y’all. It’s incredible. Every paragraph is crafted: tight and wound up in the nuances of navigating a world you don’t belong to but are forced into. Andrew’s upset and awkwardness comes through in his every decision, the darkness at the edges of his vision giving him a narrow focus on a singular objective. He has to find Eddie’s killer. Whether the truth lies in Halse’s after-hours crowd Eddie hung out with or the precarious politics of academia, Andrew digs his own grave, trying to find Eddie’s.

Summer Sons is southern gothic—if, that is, Faulkner did coke off the spine of As I Lay Dying and asked himself, “how can I make it gay?” There’s an undercurrent of sex to this book that feels at home in the south—a place that sometimes gets lumped in with prudish morality, but which here instead chooses to revel in its own sweetly searing moments of desire. Contained in every touch is another that didn’t happen, every look becomes a longing glance, and each token becomes a larger part of a gift that was never given over.

This book is a slow-burning wildfire. The kind that starts leisurely in the hills and spreads high until you can’t put the book down. You have to know what happens, you have to see Andrew through his bad decisions and even worse taste in partners. It takes a while (about half the book), but the build up is worth it, deeply intentional and meant to be savored. Mandelo has crafted something truly wonderful in his explorations of men and monsters and shaped it around a haint-laden blue bottle tree. Eddie’s mysterious death is what truly grounds this book, but it’s the blood that Andrew spills into his grave that makes it a hauntingly unforgettable read.