This a tough book to review. I can't say I "liked it" in the traditional sense but I definitely give it all of 5 stars - more if I could - and think that everyone should read it. It's impossible to review the actual story without giving too much away and I don't want to spoil the surprise. I will say this - I am difficult to catch off guard when it comes to plot twists and this book got me more than once.

Everything that is wrong about conversion therapy is exposed in this book. Everything that is wrong with pressuring someone to come out of the closet or deal with their sexuality according to your timeline is addressed in this book. The need for unconditional, unbreakable love between parent and child is clearly expressed in this book.

It will not make you feel good, It might make you cry. You might have to put it down and walk away for a bit to regain some emotional stability. But in the end, you will have been forced to think deeply and carefully about the importance of seeing every human being you encounter as being in need of love and compassion.

An action-packed debut from Adam Sass! Surrender Your Sons keeps you on the edge of your seat, with unexpected twists I didn't see coming. In Connor, the book's main character, Sass nails the internal struggles of a queer kid raised in an unsupportive religious environment.

This is one of those books I really wish I enjoyed more. The premise is fantastic - part Lord of the Flies and part The Miseducation of Cameron Post - but it didn't quite work for me.

Connor lives in a small rural town with his religious zealot mother. He's gay and has a boyfriend for the first time. His boyfriend comes from a very supportive family who embraced his coming out without reservation. Connor is pretty sure his own mother won't be so accepting, but Ario encourages him to stop sneaking around and to tell his mother.

As Connor predicted, it doesn't go well and Connor finds himself on lockdown, allowed out of the house only to help the Reverend deliver meals on wheels. And there's something weird about the Reverend, and not just the thrall he seems to have the entire town under, especially Conner's mother. It seems to have something to do with one of the meals on wheels customers, a severely handicapped guy called Ricky.

Then Ricky dies and Connor is dragged from his home by burly guys who claim to be taking him to a summer camp. The only clue is a note Ricky left in the pages of an old theatre program.

The summer camp turns out to be a conversion camp on a remote island in Costa Rica. And it's run by none other than the Reverend. Connor needs to figure out why Ricky wrote the name of this camp on the program he left and what his link is to both the camp and the Reverend before it's too late.

There was lots to like about this story about kids taking justice into their own hands in order to escape a horrendous experience. There were moments of high adventure and excitement and moments of quite tender romance. But overall, I felt like there was a little too much going on. It was difficult to understand why Connor was so invested in Ricky's past when he didn't seem to know him very well, and cared about him less.

The writing itself was often overblown which drew me out of the story because the language didn't feel like Connor's language, the descriptions unlike something a teenage boy would observe.

The other campers were not well-drawn and were defined almost exclusively through the way they looked. Female campers were given particularly little definition apart from feisty Molly, the girl Connor arrives on the island with.

If you're a fan of action and adventure and kids taking the law into their own hands, this might be a book for you.

Thanks to NetGalley for letting me read it in advance.

"Surrender Your Sons" is a book with a rather interesting synopsis. The beginning of it was rather boring for me but as I read further in, it got more and more interesting. It's a certainly entertaining read.

Surrender Your Sons by Adam Sass


I want to begin this review by saying that I have followed Adam Sass on Twitter for quite awhile and when I saw Surrender Your Sons pop up on NetGalley, I immediately “wished” for it. When my wish was granted a couple of months, I literally shrieked out loud.

Connor Major trusted his boyfriend when he suggested that Connor come out to his family, but it turns out to be an utter disaster. Connor’s religious mother strongly objects to the revelation, confiscates his phone, and ultimately has him shipped off to a conversion camp on a secluded island near Costa Rica.

In theory, if Connor follows all the directions, he can leave after a week.

But no one ever leaves after only a week.

Connor and his fellow campers quickly realize that they have no way to get off the island and no one even knows where they are, so their only solution is to band together and make an escape plan.

This was an amazing book. It’s a queer version of Lord of the Flies, but it’s so much more than that. There’s also a mystery component related to someone Connor knows from his hometown, and from the very beginning, it’s clear that (much like the island from Lost), this island holds many secrets (but without the polar bears). Finding out the truth is almost as important to Connor as getting off the island.

The plot unfolds via Connor’s first-person narration and he rarely holds back. He’s definitely out of his element, and while he’s on the island, he begins to question everything about his life back home. He doesn’t know who he can trust when it comes to the campers, but he doesn’t have much choice but to take a chance with his new friends.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the political elements of this book. The concept of conversion camps is inherently political, and while the practice has been outlawed in many states, it is still legal in certain parts of the country. Multiple studies and scientific evidence points to the detrimental effect of conversion camps on queer people, but the programs are still permitted to operate. Sass tackles the subject with unflinching grace; this account is fictionalized, but it’s based on fact—this, or something like this, has been (and still is) the reality for queer teens across the country.

I would absolutely recommend Surrender Your Sons. This is a monumentally important book and I think that everybody should read it. I was riveted from the very beginning, as I watched Connor and his friends face insurmountable odds. I hope this book wins all the awards and I can’t wait to find out what Sass is working on next.



I received a copy of this book from NetGalley/the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

I tried really hard to get into this book but something about the narrating voice really turned me off which is such a disappointment because I was really anticipating this release. Hopefully, it works out better for others than it did for me because I think the concept is really intriguing.

I don't like rating books I didn't finish, but it's making me so I'll leave it at a 2

Um livro que me machucou.

Desde que o assunto da terapia de conversão foi colocado em pauta (algo que não entendo o motivo de ter acontecido), eu comecei a sofrer bastante por pensar que existem pessoas que poderiam ter sido submetida aquilo. E certamente, me peguei pensando na relação com os meus pais.

Acho que eu nunca me entreguei tanto pra uma história. Eu chorei, sofri, torci, vibrei e amei cada um dos persoangens e gostaria de parabenizar o autor por isso, pois tenho certeza que ele também se machucou enquanto escrevia isso.

É uma leitura dolorosa, mas que me deu esperança e eu acho que esse é ponto, a gente precisa de esperança. Obrigada Netgalley por ter me dado a oportunidade de ler esse livro!

A great story that kept me on the edge of my seat. Adam Sass is a great new voice in YA and I can't wait to see what he does next.

I enjoyed this book for what it was which was a way to expose conversion therapy for the atrocity that it really is. I think it’s a great way to tell LGTBQ+ youth that they are able to stand up for themselves and who they are!

My anxiety has been steadily mounting these last few days, like climbing a roller coaster that has no summit. So I'm trying to focus on the here and now: crossing off to-do list items; enjoying the extra time with my partner.

Other things that are helping:
- Having a deadline for the last big revision of my debut
- Supportive coworkers at my day job
- Virtual write-ins with my crique group
- The 2020 debut ARCs I've been getting my grubby little paws on 👀

And SURRENDER YOUR SONS is one of those! Hilarious, dark, LORD OF THE FLIES but jubilantly queer, fast-paced and hopeful. This debut from @itsadamsass is out September 15th. Preorder from your local indie bookstore, friends. Future you will thank you.

Surrender Your Sons
Book Review | 📚📚📚 3/5
Adam Sass | Flux Now

One Sentence Summary:
Young Adult novel that’s one part Hardy Boys, one part Lord of the Flies, where a mystery unfolds on an isolated island housing a gay conversion camp.

Publisher’s blurb for Surrender Your Sons can be found here: https://fluxnow.com/product/surrender-your-sons/

Surrender Your Sons.jpg

Why I was interested in this book:
See my intro sentence. Cool premise that takes an altogether horrifying situation and adds murder and mayhem.

My assessment:
With Surrender Your Sons, author Adam Sass came up with a great story. The characters are dynamic and the book is filled with page-turning suspense. While I do not read many Young Adult novels, I think there is a disconnect between the story and the actual writing. I would give the book five stars for its endearing yet edgy themes and fast-paced story. However, the delivery of the story was uneven and distracting.

Stories of the human condition:
In this single book, every single character has a voice for their own human condition story. Some don’t realize it. Others don’t evolve. However, each person in the book has their own story that sometimes resonates with other people and other times repels. I found it difficult to empathize with some, but that did not mean their stories were less than those who were changed by the situations in the book.

I recommend this book for fans of: YA novels, coming out stories, mysteries, books with good plot twists, and Lord of the Flies.

Full disclosure: I received an advance copy of this book through NetGalley(dot)com in exchange for an honest review. I would not have selected this book had I not been interested in it based on the description.

Read more of my reviews at https://tugglegrassblues.wordpress.com/.

TAGS:
#SurrenderYourSons #review-book #book review #AdamSass #comingout #YAcomingout #conversioncamp #FluxNow #Adam Sass #TuggleGrassBlues #Tuggle Grass Reviews #TuggleGrassReviews #NetGalley

I wanted this book to highlight the types of torture these kids go through. Instead, it was just about the kids and their captors. I enjoyed it. This subject makes me so mad! I can't believe people do this to their loved ones. To their children. I also can't believe it's legal. The book was written well. The characters were fun. And a revenge story is always great. I would recommend this to other readers.

Content/Trigger Warnings for Surrender Your Sons
Homophobia
Death
Suicide
Murder
Conversion Therapy
Religion used as basis for hate
Violence towards LGBTQIA+ characters
internalised homophobia

I was provided with a free arc of this story via netgalley - thank you to the publisher!

Surrender Your Sons is a powerfull LGBTQIA+ story with a broad and diverse cast. The reader follows the protagonist Connor as he deals with the aftermath of him coming out as gay to his super religious mother. She decides to send him to conversion therapy on a secluded island where escaping seems impossible. When everything seems hopeless, he starts to get to know the other children and teens in Nightlight conversion therapy camp and finds some hidden truths that change everything on the island.

I loved how the author chose to write this book in a way that conveys hope in a hopeless situation, still has humor and characters that are true to who they are. Adam Sass didn't shy away from painful parts eighter and careffully made them part of the story in a way that never felt like just another trope or lliterary device but natural and real.. The book was written in a way that made me nearly unable to put the book down and I wanted to keep reading this story. The end of the book is satisfying and provides closure for the characters and an outlook on how their life continues after the conclusion.

What I really apprecciated was the authors note in the beginning of the book that informed the reader of some of the triggers in the book and about why the story has to be told in the way it is. A truly amazing book and if you feel safe reading it with the given content warnings, I would 100% recommend it!

This ARC was provided to me through NetGalley.

I was looking forward to reading this book, and much of it was realistic and suspenseful.

Connor has just come out to his religious mother that he is gay. His boyfriend had convinced him this was the right thing to do and would make his life so much easier. However, all he and his mother have done is argue and she has taken his cell phone, so he doesn't have contact with his best friend or his boyfriend. His only chance to get out of the house (it's summer break) is to deliver Meals on Wheels. His favorite person to deliver meals to is a man who is partially paralyzed from an accident and lives with his elderly mother. When that man dies, Connor is told he is no longer delivering any meals.

Connor and his mom live in a house out in the country. Their only neighbor is their minister, who owns and runs the farm next to their house. It turns out, he also runs Nightlight Ministries, conversion therapy camps run in remote places. Connor finds this out after he is kidnapped from his home by two men and flown to Costa Rico. He is then taken by boat to a remote island.

While at the camp, he meets other kids (some as young as twelve) who are also there to be changed, adults who work at the camp, several of whom are former campers, and finds out that most campers have been there a year or longer. He makes a plan to get himself and the other campers off the island and to expose what is going on there.

My problem with the story is that once Connor arrives at the camp, everything else takes place in one day. That did not feel realistic to me when you consider everything that has to be done within that one day. What I did like is that there is a trans kiddo and correct terms were used to refer to them.

There is some graphic sexual content, so definitely upper high school. It is (obvioiusly) LGBTQ+.

I got to read the ARC ebook, and this is my honest review.

I completely fell in love with how Conner phrases things, very kid-like and off-the-wall word choices, shifting emotions and weird humor. For me, that was the best part of the book, and the reason it works well. I also very much enjoyed his character arc, and Marcos's.

It is a thriller, as the author points out, so some bad things go down. The timeline's a little frantic. The Author's Note contains content warnings, and it is reasonable. If you enjoy thrillers, queer victory despite everything, and a complicated ending, this is your book right here.

Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with a DRC of this title for review. All opinions are my own.

OK-I read the synopsis of this book and I wasn't exactly sure what I would be getting, but I was VERY intrigued. After finishing it, I am so glad that I took a chance on it and am glad to see if enter the realm of contemporary YA.

This book, believe it or not, is a mix of conversion camp (you know, the "pray-the-gay-away" cesspools), the television show Survivor and a murder mystery. No really, it's all of those things. And it's all of those things done pretty well. Connor Major is a junior in high school who has bombed on his SATs, has an ex-girlfriend who just had a baby (that isn't his, no matter what everyone else believes) and has just come out to his mother since his boyfriend encouraged him to live truthfully and out of the closet. Unfortunately, his mother refuses to believe in that part of him and sets up a deal with the next door neighbor who just happens to be a reverend who runs a secret conversion camp in Costa Rica. One night Connor is taken from his home, packed on to a plane and deposited in a camp in the middle of an island off the coast of Costa Rica. There, he begins to realize the truth of his neighbor and the camp he's been sent to. A camp that most people spend at least a year, if not more at. What he also begins to understand and that there is more to this camp than just the conversion story of its campers; the camp was also host to Ricky some 20 years ago. Ricky was another man in the town where Connor lives, and someone he saw on his Meals on Wheels route. After passing, Ricky left Connor a playbill with a cryptic note to watch out for Nightlight, the name of the camp Connor now finds himself at. Ricky had a tragic injury from earlier in his life and the more Connor finds out, the more he realizes this injury, and the death of Ricky's husband, all stem from Nightlight. So now Connor has to find a way off the island, and he has to figure out as much about it as possible before he leaves.

Highly recommend. Appropriate for grades 9-12.

Thank you to NetGalley for this ARC!

This novel was like The Miseducation of Cameron Post but on steroids! (in a good way, if that's possible)

The writing: absolutely beautiful and compels you to read on despite how tired you are. Even though the language is simple, the way the sentences are strung together is just AMAZING. Like, I can't even describe what it is about the writing that draws you in but there is just that something about it.

The story: my God. The writing cleverly combines stories of the past and stories of the now without making it feel clunky or boring.

The characters: there was quite a large cast which made it difficult to keep up at times but you still got the gist and many of them are easily distinguishable so that you get reminded again of who is who.

Overall: definitely worth a read!

"Nightlight has no TV, no running water, no basic necessities...but they've got body bags."

SURRENDER YOUR SONS drew me in with all its terror and twists. This is a horrific camp story unlike any you've read before. There is a deep emotional connection with the main character, Conner, and his relationship struggles with his mom. He can't be his true self or feel safe to be himself and that reflects throughout the story. Every chapter has a terrific hook to keep turning the pages, even though many parts of it are scary and psychological as hell. I enjoyed the deception and the layers of secrets. And the last chapter rips my heart out. My favorite line is, "This camp has a boner for freezing us inside a snow globe of detestable, old-timey America."

4/5 stars

Damn.

This book is WILD. It's so good, and I was hooked from the beginning. Some of the characters bugged me (*cough* Ario), but I didn't let that get in the way of me enjoying the flow of the story. There's quite a few trigger warnings, but the big ones would be homophobia, suicide, and abuse (physical, mental, and emotional). There are also some violent scenes as well. I am not queer, but I do consider myself an ally. There may be some other trigger warnings, subplots, or messages that might've flown over my head. So I apologize if I did miss anything that I should've noted! Honestly, this is a solid book! I would've given it 5 stars if the pacing didn't get rough about a third of the way through. It lasted in this weird limbo for around 80-100 pages, but it was enough for me to really notice it and round down my stars. This is one book to definitely check out!

But I'm a Cheerleader meets Latter Days. Except where the main characters are in denial in both of those movies, Connor knows he's queer. It's those around him in denial. 

*whistles* This. Book. Man. It was brutual. And sometimes we forget that in even modern times, where so many of us have strong support systems and can live our truths, queer pain STILL exists for so many others. Evil will always exist in different forms and prejudices so we will have to always fight for ourselves and our neighbors. Surrender Your Sons is only one of those stories out of millions. Even if it's fiction, it could easily be someone else's reality. The story in Surrender Your Sons doesn't just touch Connor's life, but spans across generations. It's a legit toxic cycle of 'because that's how it's always been done' that exists now, more relevant than ever. 

People don't like things they don't understand. They don't like being uncomfortable. They don't like change. They want others to conform to their world views so they can keep living in their boundaries. Their denial. Even if it means hurting those you claim you love. Connor's mom is so deep in denial about her son, it's devastatingly blinding. She will do or say anything that makes her son make sense to her instead of finding her way out of her own darkness. She goes to the extreme measures of having him violently kidnapped and hauled off to a secret island to fix him. Unfortunately for the island, he's not going down without a fight. 

Surrender Your Sons is a fast-paced intense thriller that doesn't shy away from the ugliness of the world. The uncomfortable parts. Adam weaves a universe by fleshing out the characters and plot so well, that by the end of the book, I was personally shocked it had only been a few days and not actual months. It takes a lot to shock me. 

From the moment I heard about Surrender Your Sons, it called to me and I did everything I could to get my hands on it. I don't usually like reading the tough stories but I'm so glad I picked this one up. I can't wait to read more of Adam's work in the future.

(Quote)Nightlight tried to snuff it out, but love grew. Love found its way to the island.(Quote) #LoveIsLouder

TRIGGERS: [Paranoia, Homophobia, Religious Bigotry, Family Bigotry, Hate Crime, Gay Bashing, Conversion Therapy, Death, Suicide, Anxiety, Panic Attacks, Psychological Trauma, Physical Trauma.]

***Thank you so incredibly much to Adam Sass, North Star Editions, Flux, and Netgalley for providing a platform for reviews and allowing me the privilege to review Surrender Your Sons.***