THE QUEEN OF SATURN AND THE PRINCE IN EXILE, Black coming-of-age novel with an SF twist

THE QUEEN OF SATURN AND THE PRINCE IN EXILE
ERRICK NUNNALLY
CLASH Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A Black nerd coming-of-age novel set in 1970s Boston about a boy who struggles to learn the truth behind his mother’s claims of otherworldly origins in the smoldering aftermath of the Civil Rights era and COINTELPRO's dying breaths.

Sean’s mother, Sojourner, consistently claims otherworldly origins—Saturn, specifically. A story he’s heard his entire life and never considered that it might be true until strange men intrude on his family’s lives. Complicating matters, his father, David, and his mother, were part of a Civil Rights era Black power group that captured the attention of the FBI.

A literal bombing put an exclamation point to the end of the organization. But as soon as Sean could read on his own, he immersed himself in science fiction, fantasy, and comic books, while largely ignoring the history of his people. That ignorance morphs into a disturbing proposition and learning the truth of his parents’ pasts could prove deadly.

Sean’s exploration introduces him to music, girls, delusions of privilege, and the thrills of revolution, all while becoming an adult. The Queen of Saturn and the Prince in Exile marries golden age sci-fi with the nostalgia of roller skates, funk, and first love.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Coming of age in 1970s Murruhkuh was pretty awful. The nightmare of Watergate and the vileness of the people who supported Nixon and then gave us the Reagan revolution was, and I say this from my own personal experience of doing it, nightmarish...conform or suffer is not new to now, nor was it new to the Nixon trauma years, nor to McCarthyism in the 1950s, nor to...you get the drift.

Always feeling torn and at sea, also not new, as you're told one thing is true but it sure doesn't look like it is has a powerful emotional cost. Paying that cost is Sean's burden. As a Black teen his emotional bills are so much more immense than any my gay atheist, but white, ass had to pay.

Sean and I shared the burden of crazy mothers. Saturn has no crust, ma'am, icy or hot or rocky...just ain't one for your people to have dug themselves into. So while my own mother was a religious nut with weird ideas about her god, her delusions were decidedly less...outré so were easier to hide.

Sean's Dad doing the good work he did to help the increasingly re-oppressed after the Civil Rights era's violent and ongoing denial and retraction of gains made impressed me. The sadness of his mother's psychotic break was intense, but I never read it as anything but psychosis. I did not question the source of the break but the sci-fi clothes she put on it were mostly just reasons to feel sadder for Sean as the coming-of-age we all must do to establish our adult selves blew his happy bubble up.

I'll call it an SF novel mostly because Sean himself needs that genre track to make his reality bearable. It's more a story about how people urgently need their stories to cope with life, and the best place to find the materials you make those stories will always be stories already told.

It's always tough to find a path through the horrors of life. This is the story of a boy becoming a man without enough of a story to hang onto, and how much that cost him in the end. Could not be more rageful, more unblinkingly aware and accusatory of the racism our country refuses to renounce and stop using to harm everyone.

Under two hundred pages of honest reflection on how each Black man is broken: By design.