Brandon's Reviews > Summer On Fire

This book was...fine. It was an enjoyable enough read that didn't do much for me. I was really interested in reading this because my dad grew up in Detroit and was a pre-teen during the riots living in one of the neighborhoods at the center of it all, so was hoping for some perspective and to learn a lot more about the experience of living there and the pulse on the ground. This book isn't that -- the riots are merely the background scenery, but the thrust of the story is really about the anti-occupation of Vietnam sentiments of the time, with the race riots a mild inconvenience to some of the actions the group of main characters wanted to partake in. And about the characters, there is a good handful of them and they are all in every scene which made trying to keep up with who was who nearly impossible. Thankfully about halfway through the book I realized it didn't matter, they were just kind of an interchangeable single amorphous blob of white folks so treating them as a single character didn't detract from the story at all. Given the setting and what the book purports to be about, it's a shame we don't hear more from the very few characters of color that pop up now and again.