SUMMER FUN

While stranded at a dead-end job in the New Mexico desert, a trans woman practices witchcraft and writes letters to an enigmatic musical legend.

This wildly imaginative novel by a two-time Lambda Literary Award finalist is framed as a series of lengthy missives penned by Gala, who works a maintenance job at a hostel in Truth or Consequences, to B——, the former frontman of the Get Happies, a 1960s California pop band. “With this letter, a sorcery has come upon you,” Gala informs her correspondent. “You will listen to what I have to say to you. You have no choice.” Gala proceeds to recount to B—— an impossibly omniscient narrating of B——’s own life and career, from B——'s start as a sensitive, melancholy child with an abusive father to the formation of the band with B——'s brothers and cousin and the existential crisis that derails the recording of Summer Fun, their legendary unreleased album and possible masterpiece. In alternating letters, Gala describes her own daily life, including an ambivalent friendship with trans woman Ronda and a relationship with Caroline, a cis lesbian videographer who turns up in T or C—or has Gala “summoned” her? The apparent inspirations for B—— and the Get Happies are Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys, although an author’s note clarifies that “the act of projecting one’s own context onto a myth does not make any truth-claims about the world or the characters in the myth.” Gala’s letters themselves could represent a fan’s projection of meaning onto the unreachable pop star, a vital act of creation in its own right and one that resonates intriguingly with the assertion of trans identity. Thornton’s writing is as rich as her ideas and spiked with wit, though the story frequently drags and is overstuffed with curiosities, such as the hovercraft that characters inexplicably drive.

Like the mysterious album of the title, a messy, mesmerizing, and deeply personal work of art.