Hello and happy Thursday. I’m coming out of what I thought could develop into a reading slump and I’m very excited about that. I’m also happy to present my first official review of a queer book on Pride month. I don’t know whether I’ll exclusively review queer books in June, but most of the books I’ll read have queer representation. Today I will be telling you about The Secret Summer Promise by Keah Brown, which I got to read and review via NetGalley. I’d like to thank NetGalley, the author, and the publisher for this opportunity.

Let me start by saying that regardless of my thoughts on the plot, the writing style and other technical aspects that come with reading a book for reviewing purposes, novels like this *need* to exist in the world. This novel is precious simply because it exists and it represents queer Black disabled teenagers, which is more than many other YA novels that I’ve read have done and will ever do. It is, BTW an own-voices novel, which means that the author is indeed queer, Black, and disabled herself, in case, you know, someone thought this book was “too diverse” or something.

Andrea, our main character, is in love with Hailee, her best friend, and tries to hide it from her for fear of losing her because she doesn’t think Hailee will love her that way. She’s immature in many ways, and she’s very close to her parents, and for those two reasons I related to her because at seventeen (and even a little older than that) I was that way. While reading this, I also thought that Andrea was putting into words what I felt growing up towards women when I hadn’t yet realized that it was possible to be attracted to them in the same way (okay, not totally the same, but you understand) that I felt about men. That, I think, was my biggest takeaway from this novel.

Now for what I didn’t really love. There’s this love triangle, and I was okay with it at first, but then it ended in a very tropey and abrupt way, like we were meant to hate this one character and root for this other and that was that. I also didn’t like that we didn’t really see how the romance that ultimately happens comes to be. It happened so quickly, and I would have liked more build-up, more angst. Then again, that could’ve just been me.