No Boy Summer

This is the 200th post on Reading While Fat!! I’ll do another giveaway to celebrate–if you leave a comment here on this post, I’ll choose a name and send you a copy of the book. Please comment by midnight EDST, October 22, 2024 and I will randomly choose a name thereafter.

No Boy Summer (2023) by Amy Spalding was a random library shelf find that was both delightfully fat positive and queer positive!

Lydia and Penny are sisters–Lydia is 13 months older, but Penny met all of their milestones first, and is the more responsible one. It’s the summer between Lydia’s junior and senior years of high school, and their parents are going on a European cruise. Penny hatches a plan for them to stay with their Aunt Grace and her partner Oscar in Los Angeles for the summer while Penny has an internship at Oscar’s firm and Lydia works in Grace’s coffee shop. This will get them out of their suburb, where both are reeling from boy drama, and give them time to figure themselves out. They make a pact to take the summer off from boys.

Things start off well–Lydia, who is a little awkward and into theatre tech, makes friends with one of Grace’s staff, Margaret, who is a “cool girl,” and gets invited into her friend group. And on nearly the first day, Lydia meets Fran, a clearly queer young woman who is working as a personal assistant for someone in a Hollywood production, but who wants to direct her own films. Although Lydia has known she’s bisexual for a while, she’s not yet come out to anyone, and a flirtation with Fran doesn’t break the rules, does it? Because Fran clearly isn’t a boy.

And so Lydia’s failures to be honest with both her sister and with Fran begin. I really loved how Spalding tied Lydia’s fatness to her difficulty making friends with other girls, and how she started her friendship with Margaret by being honest about a comment made about dieting and weight and how that made her feel. But then she continued to hide the truth about her relationship with Fran from Penny, and never told Fran about her and Penny’s plans for the summer, while at the same time being open and honest about other things, like how she feels about Fran appearing and disappearing sometimes.

Lydia is a great character–very true for someone in high school trying to figure life out. I thought Spalding made Penny a bit overachieving but I think that was to make the contrast between the two sisters more stark. I enjoyed the LA neighborhood flavor, and how the sisters explored LA on their own. And I especially loved how Lydia is a fat girl, whose story does not revolve around being fat, but it is a part of her like her bisexuality and brown hair. Her troubles were more from her choices and actions, on what she chose to reveal to the various people in her life and how those choices of what information to disclose affected them.

Highly recommend this fat positive, family drama, queer sapphic young adult romance!