The Summer Prince - Hardcover

Alaya Dawn Johnson's first novel for young adults, The Summer Prince, received three starred reviews, was longlisted for the National Book Award, and was a Kirkus Best Book of the Year. She is also the author of Love Is the Drug. She grew up in Washington, DC, attended Columbia University, and now lives in New York City.

From THE SUMMER PRINCE

When I was eight, my papai took me to the park to watch a king die.
At first, all I saw were adults clad in bright blues and greens and reds, in feathers and sequins, in cloth glittering with gold and jewels. Carnival clothes for carnival day, but covered in the early morning chill with darker coats and shawls. I looked up at this mass of grandes like I had stumbled into a gathering of orixas. I couldn't see their faces, but I could see their hands, the way they twisted them around each other, or clicked through a string of rosary beads. Some held candles, some held flowers. They were dressed for carnival, but they were quieter than I remembered from other years. The legs and torsos swayed and jostled, but no one danced. A few of the men cried. For the first time in my life, I knew a carnival without music.
I held my papai's hand. He did not look at me. A strange sigh swept over the crowd, like the wind howling past the cliffside during a winter storm. A woman's voice boomed through the park, but I was too young, too close to the ground to understand.
"I can't see," I said, tugging at my papai's hand.
With some difficulty –- our neighbors had pressed forward, packing around us so tightly he hardly had room to turn around –- he knelt.
"This is how the world works, June," he said to me. "Are you sure?"
I didn't understand his downcast mouth, the crying from the crowd, the austere finality of the woman's voice on our city's speakers. Carnival was supposed to be fun and beautiful. But I knew, because my papai never asked me idle questions, that I was to consider my answer. That if I said no, he would leave me on the ground where I could see nothing I didn't understand, and understand nothing of what I heard. And if I said yes, the answer would change my life.
I nodded.