1 star

Bear with me. The story of how I ended up reading this book is a long one (but not as long as the book itself, don't worry).

I'm currently studying Russian in college and my professor was absent for a few days to go to a conference. When he came back he told us that he had been on a panel about a popular book in Russia. The book in question was Pioneer Summer (the Russian version), which was a queer romance about two boys at a Soviet pioneer camp that had originated as a self-published work on fanfiction.net. When it was published, the book became so popular that it prompted a massive crackdown on queer literature in Russia. My professor said that the book was being translated into english and published in the US this summer, and vaguely alluded to not liking it. Of course, when I saw it on NetGalley, I had to read it! I'm regretting it a little now, not going to lie.

For many years, Yura has spent his summers at Camp Barn Swallow, a Soviet Pioneer camp. Now 16, he meets the new troop leader Volodya and the forbidden flame that arises between them will follow them many years into the future. I would like to preface this review with the fact that I deeply love fanfic and I am fully in favor of the recent trend of traditionally published fanfic. Fandom and fanfic have a special place in my heart–I've even written fanfic myself–so I went in fully ready to love this. Good god, I did not.

Most importantly, this book commits the sin of simply being boring as hell. It's about 450 pages and I could have easily cut it in half. One entire chapter is about 20 pages of a play-by-play of the crappy show that the campers put on, and about 10 more are about Yura making up scary stories to make the campers behave (this happens several times). It's unabashedly tedious and long-winded. The writing also feels super awkward and pretty cringe at points, which might be a result of translation but you can really only blame the translator so much.

Yura is a child, and everyone else in the book knows it. He's called childish by many people and remains childish throughout the whole book, including after the events of that summer. Also, reminder, Yura is 16 and Volodya is 18, which isn't the worst age gap ever but since Yura acts about 12 it's pretty uncomfortable. Volodya is pretty neurotic, which generally I think is valid given that it was not a good time to be in the Soviet Union and especially to be gay, but it makes him feel very one-note. All the female characters are either crazy, whiny, or generally useless so that's not great. Generally all the other characters are totally inconsequential, it's probably not even worth learning their names.

There's also just some deeply strange messaging around queerness. Volodya mentions that his gay sexual awakening was...his cousin. Weird parallel to draw between homosexuality and incest but, hey, The Secret History did that too and it's a masterpiece supposedly so whatever. Yura and Volodya later mention disliking flamboyant gay men and that's never challenged. There's a bit of a self-harm narrative but it's really there for no reason. There's a brief non-graphic sex scene that, despite being non-graphic, made me quite nauseous. All around, pretty terrible.

There's definitely more but I'm not flipping back through the book to check what I missed. I appreciate this book for acting in resistance to the queer censorship laws in Russia but pretty much everything else about it sucks.

Thank you to Abrams Press for this ARC in exchange for my full, honest review.