Just a Dumb Surfer Dude 3: Summer Hearts, by Chase Connor

[Ulysses]

Just a Dumb Surfer Dude 3: Summer Hearts
By Chase Connor
Published by the author, 2019
Five stars

I’ve enjoyed this whole series, improbably titled, since most of the action takes place in Vermont—not known for surfing. This final episode in the saga of Cooper Weissman, and his friends Logan, Alex and A.J., really moved me. I love that a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay is the inspiration for the central theme of the book, as these four boys try to sort themselves out as they face life after prep school.

Here’s why: Cooper Weissman is a biracial preppy, the only non-white student at the elite Dextrus Academy in Vermont. He’s there because his white, widowed father teaches English literature at Dextrus, giving Cooper the chance at a great secondary education without cost.

The downside to this is, of course, that Cooper has to spend his entire high school career excelling just to be seen; over-compensating to make up for his lack of privilege. This takes him right to the position of valedictorian for his graduating class. The speech he gives as valedictorian is, in effect, the catalyst that sets the whole plot rolling.

I liked that the issue of “what happens now?” is very much part of this. High-school sweethearts are a sticky wicket in YA fiction, and dealing with young people facing a long future is a good thing. More critically, Chase Connor decides to grapple with the whole notion of unacknowledged privilege as a hurdle in these boys’ shared life as friends and lovers. Specifically, it is Cooper’s boyfriend Alex, the son of Dextrus’s headmaster, who is the focus of the problem. I don’t think I’ve ever read a YA book where the acknowledgement of privilege mattered. As a privileged white boy who attended an elite New England prep school half a century ago, this is something I myself have had to face up to.

Logan, the California surfer dude of the series’ title, has not only taught his friends how to surf (off the coast of Maine), but has begun to grapple with the reality of not being sure where he’s going or what he wants to do. He and his boyfriend, A.J., can’t bring themselves to discuss future plans at all. This fear of what is to come, added to the frustration of dealing with unacknowledged privilege in an elite institution, makes up the two-pronged emotional core of the narrative. I was surprised at how powerful the author’s handling of the story was, even if I was dubious of the idea that, in this day and age, a New England prep school would only have a single student of color.