The Summer Prince

The Summer Prince is a 2013 novel by Alaya Dawn Johnson. Set in Brazil in the distant future, it follows three close friends including the protagonist, seventeen-year-old June Costa, and her best friend, Gil. Costa dreams of becoming a prominent artist, but her plans are interrupted when she falls in love with the Summer King, Enki, in their home, the City of Palmares Tres. Enki, like all the Summer Kings of the past, is preordained to die, and Costa races to save him, rebelling against their oppressive government.

The novel begins in the city of Palmares Tres. It is many centuries after a nuclear apocalypse that destroyed most of the earth, and the human race now survives confined in cities contained in barriers made of steel and glass. The government of Palmares Tres is overseen by a matriarchal panel, including a queen and a parliament, composed of female high officials named Aunties. Though there is the occasional male, called an Uncle, the government is primarily female-led.

In keeping with its misandrist theme, Palmares Tres elects and then sacrifices a king every five years. This ritual serves to resurface the memories of the atrocities and destruction of the past, which were mostly engendered by male leaders. The ritual also serves to reassert female dominion over political issues. It originated from the very first queen and king of Palmares Tres, who created the policy to enforce democratic elections before the year-long reign of the Summer King, who then selects a queen to rule for the next four years after his death. June renounces this sacrificial ritual, considering it inhuman.



June and Gil, meanwhile, look for different ways to bring Costa’s art into public consciousness. Valencia, June’s mother, denies that she has any future in the art world; in contrast, Valencia’s wife, Auntie Yaha, believes in her and gives her encouraging words. June despises her mother because she had an affair with Auntie Yaha when her father was near death. Auntie Yaha’s professional connections enable Gil and June to go to upper-class parties and conventions; this includes the reception for the newly elected king, Enki. When she meets Enki, June immediately believes he has potential as an artist. She tries to get his attention, but instead, he notices Gil, stirring her jealousy. June creates a beautiful mural depicting Enki and Gil sharing a kiss at the end of the reception. Enki notices and asks to collaborate with June. She agrees, falling further in love with him.

As Enki’s year as the king goes on, he begins to love June back. Gil is also still in love with him and begs June to save his life. Enki does not care that he will be soon sacrificed. He wants to use his year as the king to bring light upon the lower class of people in Palmares before he martyrs himself. He undergoes nanotechnological body alterations to be able to communicate with the city’s embedded technology. Enki accurately predicts that a large, spiderlike maintenance robot is about to deteriorate. He warns the city in time to save thousands of people’s lives; however, his use of technology incites a political struggle over the rights of citizens to use technology. Those who side with technology believe that Palmares should open up its borders to the rest of the world and seek to improve its systems. The other camp, called the isolationists, oppose any drastic change. June takes the middle ground in this debate. The queen, Oreste, values human community over any technological end, while Enki takes the opposite extreme on the continuum. The violence that ensues comes to a pause when the technology lovers are detained after a violent protest. The issue is escalated to the parliament for debate. Around that time, June finds out that Queen Oreste and the Aunties staged the violence in order to squelch the erupting protests.

June tells Enki they should try to escape Palmares Tres together. They escape for Salvadore, where Enki was born. There, a local civilian leaks their whereabouts to Oreste. Enki reveals that it doesn’t matter where he runs because he was surgically implanted with nanotechnology that will kill him at the end of the year no matter what he does. He sought asylum with June only to make her happy. In Salvadore, they await Queen Oreste’s arrival to take him away. Enki finds a copy of Salvadore’s library, which was thought to be destroyed, and gives it to June. During his sacrificial ceremony, he nominates June to be queen for the following term. She reluctantly accepts the charge of being a political leader, knowing that she must change the world herself if it is to change at all.



At the novel’s conclusion, June examines the library archives. She finds a recording from the first Queen, Odette, who explains to her contemporaries that she wants the sacrifices to end as soon as possible. June makes this file public, hoping to alter the ideological genome of their society and interrupt the normalized cycle of atrocity that characterizes Palmares Tres. Thus, using the tropes of science fiction and historical unrest in Brazil, Johnson’s novel suggests that political revolution is not impossible when it refers back to a society’s foundational ideas and provides new context or interpretation.