September Girls by Bennett Madison (review)

Spending the summer seaside in a town full of gorgeous blonde girls who just want to party and hook up would be the ideal summer vacation for some seventeen-year-old boys. Sam, however, finds the girls vaguely creepy in their similarity; more significantly, he's still thrown by his mother's leaving five months ago and gunshy about women in general. Sam's older brother Jeff has no such reservations, though and he's soon entangled with Kristle despite her constant attempts to sleep with Sam. It's from DeeDee, Kristle's maybe-sister and sometimes roommate, that Sam finally learns what the readers already know from the interpersed chapters narrated by the collective voice of the Girls: the blonde beauties are actually creatures of the sea, exiled by their vengeful father as punishment for their mother's supposed betrayal, and their only way to return home is to have sex with a virgin—like Sam. The book totally embraces the absurdity of its premise, with a few brilliantly deployed allusions to Disney's The Little Mermaid for good measure. Ultimately, though, the sardonic humor is really just an amusing invitation to an exquisitely haunting work of magical realism, contemplating love, identity, and what "being a man" really means—if it means anything. Brittle, vulnerable, and often preoccupied with masturbation, Sam is no one's idea of a fairy-tale hero, and his narration moves from outrageously crude to strikingly beautiful as his summer of freedom turns into a profound moment of self-discovery. The chorus-like voices of the Girls that interweave with his story are similar in their postured aloofness as well as their obvious and perhaps self-inflicted pain. In addition to being a tale about summer flings and first romances, this is also a thoughtful look at that other "first love," that of family, and how the flaws, the idiosyncrasies, and the absences of our fathers, mothers, and siblings serve to shape us in ways that are as unknowable as the sea itself.