Eight Arms Reading Room

Read: The Dead of Summer -- Ryan La Sala

Oh, the hopes I had for this book! I saw it on TikTok, described as 'queer horror with coral zombies off the coast of Maine' and say no more, folks, I was IN.

Here's the blurb:

Ollie Veltman is finally coming home to the quaint island of Anchor's Mercy after a year away while his mom battled cancer. It should be a celebration -- his mom is cancer free, and she's determined to have the best summer ever -- but Ollie's (now ex) best friends think he abandoned them, and he's returning with a lot of questions. Because for a place that's perfect on the surface, a secret rots below the waves. A secret that could explain his mom's illness, and the illness of so many other locals.

It's queer YA horror, as it turns out. And while I've read plenty of YA, it's not my genre of choice these days. And honestly, it doesn't read very much like the YA that I've read. Ollie and his friends are supposedly about to go to college, but the characters read much younger than they purportedly are. They were constantly being excluded from conversations by "the grownups" and while a standard trope in YA is that only the teenagers can save the world, these kids seemed more middle school age or in their very early teens than in their late teens.

It also doesn't really feel like it's set in Maine. The island seems more of a replica of Provincetown, Massachusetts, which is New England, for sure, but there's Massachusetts New England and then there's Maine New England. (Ask me how I know.) I do love how queer-friendly the entire town is. One of the most prominent citizens runs the local drag queen brunch establishment and being queer is mostly unremarkable (to the townspeople, anyway, there's a little less acceptance from the tourists. The townie/tourist divide feels 100% Maine, though, actually.)

There's really no romance in this book at all. Ollie seems to be gay and has a crush on one of the boys in the story and another boy seemingly has a crush on Ollie but no action taken by anyone on their attraction.

I probably could have handled all those things and enjoyed the book if it hadn't been for the way it's structured. It's presented in sort of a 'multimedia' manner, with the story from Ollie's POV alternating with scanned images of pages from a researcher's journal and transcripts from interviews the researcher conducts. This presentation would have been fine in a paperback version but was incredibly annoying to read in ebook. The journal pages and interview transcripts had hyperlinks to read the text in an 'accessible' format. Which meant that I was constantly jumping back and forth in the book and I gotta tell you, that really, really impeded my enjoyment of the story. If the publisher (Scholastic, btw, not an indie publisher who would have known better) had just presented the journal entries and interview transcripts in plain text, I would probably not be bitching about this book to you right now.

It also ends in a cliffhanger and while I do want to know what's causing the coral zombies (legit creative!), I may not read the next book, especially if it has a similar format/structure.

I don't know--what do you think? Would the format be annoying to you? What do you do about books with a premise that sounds interesting but the execution falls short?