His brain is broken in exactly the way mine is: I loved reading along as he thinks in snippets of Real Housewives gifs - “Not well, bitch!” - and as the campers talk to each other in Drag Race references. Connor listens to Carly Rae Jepsen and Ariana Grande to calm himself down. This is a book deeply steeped in modern gay culture in ways I found delightful.

However, as was the case in Lost - which Sass has said was a major inspiration for the novel - although the mystery is propulsive and engaging, and I did find myself furiously flipping pages to find out what happens next, where Surrender Your Sons really shines is in its richly drawn characters.Ĭonnor is a funny, empathetic, relatable hero, and Sass’s narration of his inner monologue is full of instantly recognizable queer cultural specificity. Connor decides that, in order to take down Nightlight, he needs to figure out what happened decades ago that is affecting his current situation, and he becomes a detective-adventurer of sorts as he struggles to retain his sense of self under the oppressive, suffocating religious tactics at the camp. The mystery at the heart of Surrender Your Sons concerns a dead man, a long-ago hate crime, a mysterious shadow company, and a series of missing tapes. The book is being promoted with the tag line “Get ready to run for your love.” / via Or, as Nightlight camper Marcos puts it: “How nice of you to visit me in my loneliness.” That quote would have once adorned my AIM away message, and it will likely soon be the first tattoo of queer teens everywhere. Surrender Your Sons asks: how do we grapple with that knowledge, that our lives are defined by pain? How do we find a way through the fog and towards each other? And Surrender Your Sons answers: When the whole world is against us, finding support from each other is the only way out and through. Yes, Darcy and the campers at Nightlight have been dealing with the crisis of the therapy camp before Connor arrived, but he too has been dealing with his own in-progress crisis, and now their crises are intersecting. One of the biggest themes of the book is that, for most of us, to be queer is to be in pain for the formative years of our lives.

It’s a chilling line that hints at just how much Connor has to learn about the Lord of the Flies-esque situation into which he’s been dropped, but like much of the novel, it also works on another level.

He’s on an island, away from society, away from his family, and away from his boyfriend… and the frightening Reverend who presides over the camp won’t let him leave until they turn him straight. It’s Connor’s first morning at Nightlight Ministries, the gay conversion therapy camp to which he’s been dragged by the burly men his mother hired to kidnap him, and Connor is terrified. “Welcome to our crisis, already in progress,” says fellow camper Darcy Culpepper to Connor Major, the hero of Adam Sass’s phenomenal new debut YA horror novel Surrender Your Sons.

Surrender Your Sons by Adam Sass