Alaya Dawn Johnson

Emily Bird is an African American high school senior in Washington D.C., member of a privileged medical family, on the verge of college and the edge of the drug culture, and not really sure which way she will go--then one day she wakes up in the hospital with no memory of what happened.

Love Is the Drug

Fraser Simons

This is an interesting YA novel to me because the synopsis set expectations that wasn’t really what the book was really about. It’s a lot of family drama and interpersonal/communication problems,,, but with the spectre of this really scary event where the protagonist can’t remember an evening. This event unfolding is paced alongside an outbreak and the relationship drama(s) unfolding, and so a lot of it feels like a bunch of B plots unfolding instead of an A plot with B plots. 

Once I recalibrated that expectation I was drawn in again and ended up enjoying it. The author is great at characterization and inclusive elements, and those things are mostly subversive to the genre still, so I end up gaining a lot of satisfaction from that.

I do think this book lost a bunch of readers in the first third of the book though, simply because of marketing and setup. I grabbed this because I read The Summer Prince, a fantastic YA biopunk-romance intersectional and similarly inclusive book. I love that book. This book has some of those components I love but if the framing doesn’t work for you this, try out The Summer Prince - it is fantastic!

Reading this while a pandemic is going on is interesting. If you have the bandwidth I recommend reading fiction like this (I’ve read 4-5?) because the speculative components and how they interact with reality is pretty fascinating to me. 

Pretty much everyone assumes that governments will use it as an opportunity and/or over correct for populations who don’t quarantine and what not. At least so far as in North America, we have seen citizens not being wrangled at all. Rough.

Love Is the Drug

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