Bad Summer People by Emma Rosenblum

To prepare for submitting my manuscript to agents, I’m searching for potential “comp titles,” or comps.  Those are books, preferably published within the past 2-3 years, to fill in the blank in one of these sentences:   

“Readers who liked ______________ will love Retire To An Island, They Said.”    

or:

“Retire To An Island, They Said” will fit perfectly on the shelf or in a display with ___________.”

Back in December, I wrote about how Save What’s Left by Elizabeth Castellano might work.  This week I made a list of other potential titles based on books also purchased, according to Amazon, by those who purchased Save What’s Left.

One of them was Bad Summer People by Emma Rosenblum.  A reviewer called it “beach community satire,” so I thought it might have potential. In a nutshell, it’s about rich people behaving badly while at their summer houses on Fire Island.  My book does include people behaving badly on an island, but they sure aren’t rich!

Most novels involve a protagonist, who has a goal, and an antagonist, who somehow gets in the way of the goal. I can’t identify a protagonist in Bad Summer People; the characters are more like a cast of antagonists, with one villain who is not identified as such until the end.  While the book does begin with discovery of a dead body, the death is not central enough to the plot to characterize the story as a murder mystery. The story feels less like a who-done-it and more like a reality show about a bunch of self-centered 40-somethings.

I was 60% into the book before I felt empathy for one of the characters. I hope the characters in my novel are a little more likable than most of the crew in this book. That said, given the book’s title, I think the author’s goal may have been to create unlikable characters. If so, well done!

Although I didn’t connect much with the characters or the setting, the story eventually drew me in, similar to how Bachelor in Paradise can if I accidentally forget to change the channel when it starts. I was curious to see who ended up dead and how, whose secrets were revealed, and which couples were still together at the end.

I’ll have to read a few more books on my list before I decide whether this one is a contender to be one of my comps!