The Summer We Got Free Review — Is It Worth Reading?

Updated on October 9, 2026

Verdict: A haunted-house family novel about Black queer desire and the cost of silence, with a genuine emotional payoff and a Lambda-winning pedigree, held back by a slow first half and a romance that stays deliberately understated.

Best for: Readers who want character-driven literary fiction with a sapphic awakening at its centre, who are happy to let a ghost story unfold slowly, and who care more about a family getting free than about on-page romance.

Heat level: ★★☆☆☆ (2/5 — sensual rather than explicit; romance.io does not index it)

Rating: ★★★★☆ (4.1/5 — a 4.34 Goodreads average and a 2% did-not-finish rate, trimmed for the pacing complaint that runs through the low-star reviews)

Tropes: Queer awakening, forbidden love, married heroine, the stranger who arrives, family secrets, haunted house, magical realism, dual timeline, grief and healing, church and community.

The Summer We Got Free by Mia McKenzie is a standalone debut novel, first published in 2012 by the small BGD Press and winner of the 2013 Lambda Literary Award for LGBT Debut Fiction — a piece of literary, character-driven fiction set in West Philadelphia in the summer of 1976, where Ava Delaney, the wild girl turned numb, dutiful wife, collides with Helena, her husband’s sister, a visitor whose arrival wakes up everything the Delaney house has spent seventeen years keeping quiet.

It holds a 4.34 average across 1,525 Goodreads ratings, with 85% of them at four or five stars, and StoryGraph readers rate it 4.4 with only 2% abandoning it. The dissent is quiet but consistent, and it is almost all about one thing. Both the praise and that one thing are worth understanding before you start.

What Is The Summer We Got Free About?

The Summer We Got Free is literary fiction with a supernatural streak, and it sits closer to historical sapphic fiction than to romance. The present-day story takes place in 1976, with a second strand reaching back into the family’s earlier life. That period matters: this is a close-knit Black Christian community in which the church sets the terms of belonging, and in which being queer — for the older generation especially — means shame, secrecy and a life split in two.

Ava Delaney is defined at the start by what she has lost. Once a wild girl and a gifted artist, she has let both go, and lives with her husband Paul inside the creaky family house with the rest of the Delaneys. Helena is only passing through on her way to New York. What she finds is a family that has been shunned by its church and its neighbours for seventeen years, since the violent death of Ava’s brother, George Jr. The book moves between perspectives and decades.

What Makes This Black Queer Literary Novel Work

Ava’s reawakening: The most praised thread by a distance. Readers describe watching the numb adult Ava reconnect with the girl she used to be, and Lesbrary’s reviewer calls that arc the heart of the book.
The haunting: The ghosts are real on the page but never reduce to horror. One Goodreads reader says it might raise the hair on your neck without giving you nightmares, and several name the magical realism as a highlight.
Two generations of queerness: Reviewers draw a line between an older generation for whom desire meant self-disgust and secrecy and a 1970s generation able to get free — at a real personal cost.
Compassion for everyone: Characters who look cruel early are explained rather than excused. StoryGraph readers vote 91% yes on strong character development, and 81% say flaws are a main focus.
A community rendered from the inside: The church, the block and the family are written with intimacy. Lambda Literary Review praised the prose as deceptively plain, and comparisons to Toni Morrison and Zora Neale Hurston come up in reader reviews.

Book Synopsis

The Delaney house sits on its Philadelphia street like a bruise nobody mentions. Seventeen years ago something violent happened to this family, and the congregation that once embraced them closed ranks against them under the guidance of its pastor. The Delaneys stayed, inside a house that has started keeping its own secrets.

Ava has survived by going still. The girl who once ran wild and painted with abandon is now a careful wife to Paul, a daughter to a father carrying his own anger and history, a sister to Sarah, who is not sure what she is allowed to want. Nobody talks about George Jr. Then, in the heat of the summer of 1976, Paul’s sister Helena turns up on the doorstep, on her way somewhere else and apparently unbothered by the family’s reputation.

Helena is curious, frank and unafraid of the house. She asks the questions nobody asks, and she looks at Ava in a way no one has in years. Ava starts to taste food again, to feel the pull of the person she used to be — and of the woman across the kitchen table. But the house is waking up too. The past is pressing against the walls, and as Ava begins to come back to life, something in the Delaney home seems determined to make her pay for it. The open question is whether a family can survive the truth about itself, and whether Ava can.

My Review

The emotional architecture of this book is superb, and I want to lead with that because it is the reason the ratings sit where they do. McKenzie takes a family that has frozen itself around one catastrophe and thaws it out one person at a time, and she refuses to write any of them as villains. The angry father, the shrunken sister, the husband holding onto a marriage of habit — each gets a history that makes sense of them.

The second real strength is how the supernatural is handled. The ghosts are literal enough to unsettle and ambiguous enough to read as grief and repression made physical, and McKenzie never over-explains them. That restraint lets the magical realism carry the argument: silence does not make a thing go away, it gives it somewhere to live. The two-generation structure is where the queerness lands hardest, because the book can set the cost of hiding against the cost of getting free.

Where it struggles is pace, and this is not my personal gripe — it is the single most repeated criticism in the low-star reviews. Readers describe a story that unfolds slowly and carefully, a book that took one reader three months to finish, and a plot in which everything seems to happen in the last forty pages. StoryGraph has 28% of readers marking it slow-paced, and one of its two did-not-finish notes simply says too slow, too much family drama. Smaller, attributable notes: a handful of reviewers mention typos or say a firmer edit would have tightened the narrative; Reactor’s Lee Mandelo flags uneven pacing in the climax; one reader found the symbolism heavy-handed; Lesbrary’s review found the male characters flat.

One expectation to reset: this appears on sapphic reading lists, and it earns its place, but it is not a romance. Ava’s desire for Helena is the spark that sets the whole book moving, and it is written with real charge, yet the relationship is one thread in a family novel rather than its engine. At least one reviewer, writing for Autostraddle, wished for more explicit queer intimacy. If a slow-building queer awakening is what drew you, you will get it. If you want a love story with a romance arc, calibrate.

My honest note: A generous, haunted, beautifully humane debut whose patience with its own story is both its method and its weakness. If you need a romance plot or a quick hook, this will test you. If you can let it take its time, the ending earns every page.

Element	In The Summer We Got Free
Central relationship	Ava Delaney & Helena — a numbed married woman and her husband’s free-spirited sister, a forbidden queer awakening
Core tropes	Queer awakening, forbidden love, the stranger who arrives, family secrets, haunted house, magical realism
Setting	West Philadelphia, summer 1976 — a Black church community and the family it has shunned for seventeen years
Heat level	2/5 — sensual rather than explicit; not indexed by romance.io
Series	Standalone — a complete novel, no sequel
Content notes	Homophobia and lesbophobia, religious bigotry, murder and child death, hate crime, domestic, emotional and physical abuse, infidelity, grief and death of a parent, racism and racial slurs, brief references to rape and police brutality

How Spicy Is The Summer We Got Free?

A 2/5. romance.io does not index the book at all, which is itself informative — it is catalogued as literary fiction, not romance. Desire is central to the novel and written with real sensuality — food, touch, heat, the body coming back to life — and StoryGraph readers do tag sexual content. But the reviewers who mention intimacy describe it as understated rather than graphic, and one reviewer’s main wish was for more of it on the page.

The element worth knowing about in advance is not the heat but the darkness around it: the violence at the centre of the family’s history is homophobic, and StoryGraph readers tag homophobia, hate crime and child death among its graphic content warnings. No reviewer I found flags anything more explicit than that. If you want literary sapphic fiction in the same register, The Color Purple and The Gilda Stories sit at the same 2/5.

Who Should Read This Book?

You’ll likely love it if: you read literary fiction for character rather than plot, you want a sapphic awakening told from inside a Black family and church community, you like your ghost stories quiet and meaningful, and you are moved by stories of healing across generations.

You may want to skip it if: you need a book to grab you in the first fifty pages, you are looking for a romance with a central love arc, you want explicit heat, or homophobic violence in a family’s past is a hard limit for you.

In short: a slow, humane, haunted debut that pays off, as long as you came for the family rather than the romance.

What Readers Are Actually Saying (October 2026)

There is no current buzz cycle around this book. It is a 2012 small-press debut with no audiobook edition that I could find, no Amazon editorial-review block, and no trade coverage from Kirkus or Publishers Weekly surfacing anywhere I looked. Reddit could not be checked from here, so I cannot report on its footprint there either way. What it has instead is a durable literary reputation. Across 2013 and 2014 it drew reviews from Lambda Literary Review, Autostraddle, Lesbrary and Reactor’s Queering SFF series on its way to and after the Lambda win, and one reader notes it is becoming canonical Black queer literature. Goodreads reviews show it assigned in classes and picked up by book clubs — that, not a viral moment, is how new readers find it now.

Why readers love it (according to the discourse): The emotional payoff comes first. More than one reviewer says they cried at the end, and the Amazon summary says readers feel the ending lands. Then the prose — “finespun” and beautiful are recurring descriptions. The magical realism is praised again and again, usually alongside Philadelphia as a living setting. Readers value that the book is about two generations of Black queer people and what getting free costs each of them. And the characters, flawed as they are, draw real admiration: 91% of StoryGraph readers say the character development is strong, even though only 48% find the characters straightforwardly lovable.

What readers argue about and complain about: Pace, above everything. The low-star reviews circle back to it again and again — slow to start, slow in the middle, with the plot compressed into the final stretch. Second: editing. It is not a loud complaint, but it recurs, from reviewers who noticed typos to a critic who called them first-novel hiccups. Third, and attributable to individual voices rather than consensus: heavy-handed symbolism, flat male characters, loose threads around Paul and Geo, and an ending at least one reader found predictable. Opinions divide on the characters themselves; Lambda Literary Review calls them not especially likeable and treats that as the point.

The standalone question worth asking first: it stands entirely alone. The book resolves its central story, and several reviewers describe the ending as hopeful and healing rather than bleak, though one Autostraddle reviewer wanted more closure on some secondary threads. There is no sequel. If it works for you, McKenzie’s later novel Skye Falling is where to go next in her catalogue, and it has a Libro.fm audiobook edition where this book has none.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is The Summer We Got Free a romance?

No. It is literary fiction with a sapphic awakening at its centre. Ava’s desire for Helena drives the story, but the relationship is one thread in a family novel, and romance.io does not index the book.

How spicy is The Summer We Got Free?

A 2/5. The desire is sensual and important, but reviewers describe the intimacy as understated rather than explicit, and at least one wished for more of it on the page.

Is The Summer We Got Free scary?

Not really. The Delaney house is haunted, but the ghosts work as magical realism rather than horror. The darker material is the homophobic violence in the family’s past, which StoryGraph readers tag as graphic.

Is The Summer We Got Free a standalone?

Yes. It is a complete, self-contained novel with no sequel. Mia McKenzie’s later fiction includes the novel Skye Falling.

Is there an audiobook of The Summer We Got Free?

Not that I could find. Amazon lists only Kindle and paperback editions, and Libro.fm stocks McKenzie’s later novel Skye Falling but not this one.

Did The Summer We Got Free win any awards?

Yes. It won the 2013 Lambda Literary Award for LGBT Debut Fiction.

If You Loved The Summer We Got Free, Read These Next

The closest companion is The Color Purple, which shares the same ground: Black women, church and family, and a queer awakening that frees a woman who has been made small. If the supernatural thread is what held you, The Gilda Stories offers a Black lesbian speculative novel that also moves across decades. And for another literary novel about a Black woman choosing freedom at real personal cost, Patsy is the natural next read.

For more in this register, browse our guide to Black lesbian books, the best sapphic books of all time, or the full Book Reviews collection.

The Bottom Line

The Summer We Got Free is a debut that aims at something large — a haunted family saga about Black queer desire, faith and the damage done by silence — and mostly gets there. The family is written with rare compassion, the ghosts carry real meaning, and the ending delivers the emotional release the whole book has been building toward. It is also slow to get going, lightly edited in places, and far less of a love story than its place on sapphic lists might suggest. The reader who wants literary fiction with a queer heart will find one of the quiet essentials of the genre. Check The Summer We Got Free on Amazon →

The Eikna Overall Ranking

On the Eikna scale, The Summer We Got Free ranks as an award-winning Black queer literary debut — haunting, humane and emotionally generous, held back by a slow build, and best approached for Ava’s reawakening and the family’s healing rather than for romance.