Summer Fun

March 1, 2021

Young trans woman Gala is obsessed with the Get Happies, a fabled 1960s California band whose mysterious leader Gala finally writes. What starts as a mournful conversation about the band's failure to release its final album, Summer Fun, ends up as a discussion about music, identity, and culture. From the author of the Lambda Literary Award short-listed The Black Emerald.

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May 17, 2021
A 20-something transgender woman’s obsession with a 1960s rock band drives Thornton’s spirited if overstuffed latest (after The Dream of Doctor Bantam). Get Happies superfan Gala writes a series of lengthy adoring letters to the band’s lead singer, B—, starting in 2009, from a trailer park in Truth or Consequences, N.Mex. Through the letters, Gala reveals details about her work at a youth hostel, her best trans friend, and a complicated, flirtatious relationship with a cisgender videographer. Her correspondence also reinvigorates the histrionics of B—’s past, as well as B—’s tumultuous evolution, the details of which are revealed midway through. The epistolary form lends itself well to the theme of extreme fandom and the soulful self-discovery of transgender identity as Gala yearns for belonging and contends with her depression. Gala and B—’s separate trajectories through joy, confusion, and episodes of darkness deepen both characters. The novel’s evocation of the hippie era and band culture is also remarkable, though Gala’s lengthy missives begin to lose steam soon after B—’s big reveal. Still, Thornton wrings a great deal of heart and soul from this earnest confessional. Agent: Jin Auh, the Wylie Agency.

June 15, 2021
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.

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