The marketing copy for this book describes it as My Brilliant Friend meets Blue is the Warmest Color. Dogs of Summer follows two young friends trapped in an oppressive summer in their poor village on Tenerife in the Canary Islands, and trapped in the bizzare transition from childhood to adolescence. I can really see the influence of My Brilliant Friend here — the girls are inextricably close, in the way where love and jealousy and attaction become hopelessly tangeld up together, and they meander through the summer hoping to get the chance to see the beach, which lays so close by but so far outside the scope of their daily lives. It’s sort of kind of a little bit like Blue is the Warmest Color, I guess, in that it concerns a queer sexual awakening and spends a great deal of time lingering on the explicit details of its characters’ bodies (although not exploitatively). In fact this book is stuffed full of images of bodies, of bodily excretions, of sex, of masturbation. It’s grotesque and in some way touching, a somehow perfect encapsulation of that tremendously weird time when girls are both playing with Barbies but also learning to masturbate with them. It’s disgusting and heartfelt and raw. I don’t feel this novel is groundbreaking, in part because I am personally a little offput by all of the vomit and shit imagery, and in part because I’ve seen this story in other places that I’ve felt have done it better, including My Brilliant Friend and the original first draft of Plot Points in Our Sexual Development. But it’s a good, short read.