A Book Rec for Your Song of the Summer
Recommending 10 novels for the summer of Pop Girls, from 'Brat' to Chappell Roan
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It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they deemed Kamala Harris “Brat,” and I didn’t know what I was doing with my August reading list.
I’d finished the most anticipated novel of the summer, Yasmin Zaher’s The Coin. What next?
What I did know, however, was that it had been the summer for Songs of the Summer. The concept isn’t new—a mainstream hit that dominates the airwaves from late spring to back-to-school season—but in 2024, the contenders have come in spades. Long-reigning pop royalty clings to dominance while a new generation of stars emerges, a mountain of inescapable hits emerging between them. A ten-way Barbenheimer for pop hits, if you will.
From the rise of Chappell Roan to the unsurprising next chapter of Billie Eilish’s hegemony to the long-awaited arrival of Brat, it’s not just the summer for Songs of the Summer. It’s the Summer of the It Girl, for whom mainstream pop clamors with open arms. And it’s not the summer of one dominant It Girl, but of many distinctive It Girl sub-identities. Chappell Roan’s drag-inspired, technicolor, infectiously joyful ultra-gay anthems. Sabrina Carpenter’s gleefully horny bubblegum princess pop persona. Charli xcx’s indie sleaze-nostalgic, party girl-oriented hyperpop. Billie Eilish’s hyper-sensitive, breathy queer ballads that push up against a reified embrace of butch aesthetic. Not something new as much as something reified: the summer of personalities.
Perhaps, therein lies the answer to my summer reading list quandary. In my last two reading guides, I’ve discussed the phenomenon of summertime It Girl Novels—works of “cool girl” literary fiction written by, for, and often about members of said demographic.1 (In practice: young, intellectual, literary-minded women; in spirit: Hot Girls, It Girls, those that aspire to be them, etc).2 Novels that, via either their protagonist or their author themself (and often both), provide an It Girl over whom to briefly obsess, to alternatively revere, feel for, revile, see ourselves in, or all of the above.
Last year, the chosen one was Emma Cline’s The Guest; this year, it’s likely The Coin. In recent years, even more notable titles, like Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation. In a broader historical sense, Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays, or even Sylvia Plath’s foundational The Bell Jar (the It Girl Novel does not always have to be new, after all). Literary fiction, like pop, lends itself to the cult of personality, and thus, to the It Girl.
True, the Song of the Summer inherently relies on a sense of inescapability and catchiness that doesn’t really translate to literature. A novel requires a different sense of commitment, and as a result, the circle for whom any one book is the “novel of the summer” is naturally smaller than audience of its musical counterpart. But perhaps this is the summer when the two finally converge. Perhaps the summer of coexistent musical It Girls, where each represents not a hegemonic approach to pop but a sub-identity to embrace wholeheartedly, lends itself a little more to the summer reading list. An It Girl—and an It Novel—for whichever persona has managed to hold your attention.
On that note, an end to hegemony in favor of the crowded reading list. For each reigning Song of the Summer, I’m recommending a novel that captures its respective spirit.
The Song: “Please Please Please” by Sabrina Carpenter
The Book: Bunny by Mona Awad (Viking, 2019)
As a follow-up to “Espresso,” her inescapable song of the spring,3 Disney Channel Alum of the Year Sabrina Carpenter usurped her own #1 slot on the charts with a second hit in “Please Please Please.” Thanks in part to its viral music video starring Carpenter’s real-life boyfriend, Irish It Boy Barry Keoghan, “Please Please Please”—in which Carpenter attempts to savor the early days of a relationship with an embarrassing man before the rest of the world discovers his flaws—quickly became even more impossible to avoid.
Like Carpenter, Mona Awad’s surrealist horror-satire protagonists are no strangers to humiliation. They’re wont to say the wrong thing, feel obsessive shame about their appearance, lose friends (or just lack them in the first place), act erratically in public, experience body horror in front of judgmental audiences.
In Awad’s 2019 novel Bunny, Samantha Mackey is one such protagonist, a socially awkward writer ambling through her final semester of an MFA program when she discovers her classmates—a group of four wealthy, popular young women known resentfully as the “Bunnies”—are busy with more than just their theses. In fact, they’re engaged in a modern-day Frankenstein, conjuring an unknown dark magic in repeated attempts to build the perfect man from scratch. One problem: the men continually come up short.
It’s Carpenter’s same desire that the Bunnies hold for each of their doomed creations: don’t embarrass me, motherfucker. That is, until Samantha joins their literary coven, and the perfect man suddenly seems within reach—if Samantha’s entire reality doesn’t unravel in the process.
The Song: “Good Luck, Babe!” by Chappel Roan
The Book: Nothing to See Here by Kevin Wilson (Ecco, 2019)
The likes of Carpenter and Brat might dominate this summer, but no one is having a year like Chappell Roan. After a slow start to her music career, Roan’s drag-inspired, gleefully gay, campy, synth-pop debut album, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, has been on a steady rise toward mainstream recognition since its release last year. But her latest single, “Good Luck Babe!”, shot her into the stratosphere.
In “Good Luck, Babe!”, your favorite artist’s favorite artist laments a doomed past relationship with a lover still in denial about her queerness, warning her,
“When you wake up next to him in the middle of the night /
With your head in your hands, you’re nothing more than his wife /
And when you think about me all of those years ago /
You’re standing face to face with I told you so.”
The prophecy proves true for the central relationship in Nothing to See Here, Kevin Wilson’s funny, poignant family dramedy about two one-time best friends driven apart by an incident at their elite boarding school. One friend, Lillian, sees her life derailed after she’s falsely accused of violating the school’s code of conduct, dashing her dreams of escaping poverty for academic greatness. The other, Madison, coasts on charm, political acumen, and piles of generational wealth that lead her straight into the arms of an up-and-coming senator.
Then, a decade after high school, the former friends are reunited when Madison approaches the down-on-her-luck Lillian with a strange request: spend the summer caring for her stepchildren, Roland and Bessie—who happen to burst into flames when agitated.
Over the next weeks, Lillian’s resolve—and her willingness to do anything for Madison—is tested as she simultaneously bonds with the twins and realizes there may have been something sinister behind Madison’s request for her to take them in the first place. But saving her newfound makeshift family might also mean confronting what remains unsaid between herself and the subject of her lifelong devotion. Good luck, babe!
The Song: “Not Like Us” by Kendrick Lamar
The Book: Wahala by Nikki May (HarperCollins, 2022)
Yes, “Not Like Us” disrupts the It Girl theme of this guide—except, does it?
The sentiments behind Lamar’s diss track, a revenge-oriented elegy for a one-time-rival-turned-flop, are far from foreign to the It Girl persona. In literature especially, the It Girl thrives on misanthropy, if not outright hatred. Ottessa Moshfegh’s narrator in My Year of Rest and Relaxation can hardly stand to be around anyone, even her best and only friend. In the pop sphere, most of the songs on Charli xcx’s rabidly popular It Girl summer album Brat grapple with her pervasive distaste for various peers. In that regard, “Not Like Us” may be different only in the extent to which Kendrick’s vitriol is warranted. But with chapters upon chapters of carefully crafted takedowns, double and triple entendre used to illustrate the downfall of his own one-time peer, “Not Like Us” fits right into the It Girl’s defining trait.
So, for the diss track that gave a definitive last word in the Kendrick/Drake feud, a novel about Olympic-level hateration. In Nikki May’s Wahala, three British Nigerian women see the delicate dynamics of their longtime friend group threatened by the arrival of a fourth woman with a mysterious past. As each friend forms her own precarious bond with the new addition, they gradually discover she may be the odd woman out in more ways than one. What starts as a pastiche of Sex and the City becomes Julius Caesar in a novel that never loses its sense of fun, despite its rapidly rising stakes.
There’s no escaping Brat summer—just ask Kamala HQ. Since dropping in June, British hyperpop star Charli xcx’s ultra-marketable sixth studio album has seemingly reached every corner of the summer, from the club to the advertising world, to the presidential race, where Harris’s campaign has run full speed ahead with the Brat imagery.4
In the world of Brat, and thus the world at large, it’s the summer of the hot girl, the party girl, the internet cool girl, the sometimes jealous, petty, burdened-by-what-has-been girl, above all, the It Girl. It’s only fitting that the album made Charli—hyperpop’s long-reigning It Girl, whose album itself is about It Girl Self-Actualization—all the more ubiquitous in mainstream spaces.
Because Brat has overtaken the culture so entirely and in so many different forms, there could not possibly be one definitive, hegemonic Brat Summer, and thus, there could never be just one Brat Song of the Summer. Is a 60-year-old former attorney and current Vice President any less Brat than Chloe Sevigny or Julia Fox? Just as there is no title track on the album, there is no one Brat.
So below, four book recommendations for four different Brats.
The Song: “360” by Charli xcx
The Book: Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier (Little, Brown & Co., originally published 1938)
“When you’re in the mirror, do you like what you see? /
When you're in the mirror, you're just looking at me /
I'm everywhere, I'm so Julia*”
*(your husband’s mysterious dead wife)
If one song truly encapsulates Brat’s ethos, it’s “360,” the album’s second single, in which Charli honors the It Girl while embracing her own status as one. Though the song’s ultra-viral hook, “I’m everywhere, I’m so Julia,” may actually refer to Julia Fox, Manhattan It Girl of the early 2020s, the trendsetting, ultra-cool girl phenomenon to which Fox belongs is timeless. Daphne du Maurier knew that nine decades before Brat.
Like the titular Julia, Rebecca de Winter haunts the narrative in du Maurier’s Rebecca. The novel’s narrator—the young second wife of Rebecca’s widower, Maxim—never meets her predecessor in person, but it doesn’t matter. She sees her everywhere nonetheless. Rebecca’s memory is so inescapable, assumes so much of the narrator’s consciousness, that when tasked with relaying her story, the narrator forgets to even give herself a name.
Rebecca’s decorations still hang in the halls of Manderley, the vast estate where the narrator lives with Maxim. Neighbors, household staff, and relatives alike basque in the memories of the glorious socialite and her impeccable parties. And no one in the narrator’s orbit, from her intimidating housekeeper to her cold, enigmatic husband, can stop themselves from comparing her to Rebecca. Rebecca de Winter may be dead long before the narrator even knows who she is, but to anyone who has ever stepped foot in Manderley’s halls, her presence is undying. Suffice it to say, she’s the It Girl.
The Song: “Apple” by Charli xcx
The Book: The Coin by Yasmin Zaher (Catapult, 2024)
Is the apple rotten right to the core? The question haunts Charli in “Apple,”—perhaps Brat’s most resonant track—where she questions whether “the things passed down from all the apples coming before” might have turned her into something scary without her knowledge, and whether it might now be too late to reverse the damage. The same concern lingers for the unnamed narrator of Yasmin Zaher’s The Coin, this summer’s It Girl Novel to counter its It Girl Album.5
Like Charli, The Coin’s narrator—a wealthy Palestinian woman who finds herself in Brooklyn with limited access to her vast inheritance—instinctively avoids answering the above question altogether. As a result, years of unprocessed trauma (both immediate and generational) rear their ugly heads, this time manifesting in an obsession with personal hygiene.
Between monotonous days spent moonlighting as a middle school teacher and brushes with danger as part of an international Birkin reselling scheme, the narrator becomes consumed by her own apparent dirtiness, a need to remain clean through elaborate rituals that keep other memories at bay. Like Charli, she’s also consumed by a desire to escape her current circumstances, to get out of the city and return to a homeland that, in her case, has become unreturnable.
The Song: “The girl, so confusing version with lorde” by Charli xcx
The Book: Dreaming of You by Melissa Lozada-Oliva (Astra, 2021)
The original version of “girl, so confusing,”—in which Charli reflects on a fading friendship with a woman who seems uninterested in maintaining one—was fine. But the remix, in which Lorde, the friend in question, is invited to respond, is golden. Lorde’s verse turns an unremarkable, almost whiny lament into a brutally honest reckoning between two women caught in a series of misunderstandings, realizing that despite their history and mutual respect, they may never have been entirely compatible in the first place. It’s a realization that could not have come without the pain that came before.
In Dreaming of You, poet Melissa Lozada-Oliva’s novel in verse, two more wayward young artists come to similar realizations. Desperate to find her purpose as an artist, eponymous protagonist Melissa impulsively conducts a ritual to resurrect Tejana icon Selena Quintanilla as her own private spirit guide. But soon, the news spreads of Selena’s return and the icon ceases to belong to her alone, forcing Melissa to reckon with whether she ever did in the first place. Featuring dreamlike reflections on creativity, diasporic identity, and the nuances of celebrity, Lozada-Oliva’s striking collection of poetry is a journey through the most confusing elements of girlhood in the lives of two artists.
The Song: “Von dutch” by Charli xcx
The Book: My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh (Penguin, 2018)
“360” may have been a genuine celebration of the It Girl, but not so for Brat’s earlier promotional single. In “Von dutch,” insecurity lingers under the It Girl’s surface.
Compared to its counterparts on the rest of the album, “Von dutch”—in which Charli sings about being the subject of another woman’s virulent obsession—is far less self-reflective. Unlike “Girl, so confusing,” it’s less conscious of Charli’s penchant for defensiveness in her dynamics with other women. Unlike “Sympathy is a knife,” it’s less cognizant of the singer’s pervasive self-doubt. Sentiments like “this one girl taps my insecurities” in the former are replaced with “just admit that you’re jealous of me” in the latter. “Von dutch” is not the time for introspection.
There’s a reason, after all, that Charli described the single as Brat’s only diss track, but also chose to keep its subject notably ambiguous, leaving fans to revel in their own firestorm of guesses. The song’s unabashed confidence becomes performed disaffectedness becomes unexamined, festering anger. It conceals its own bitterness. It postures.
So too does the narrator of Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, a wealthy orphan who resolves to cope with unaddressed trauma and a general distaste for other people by sleeping for an entire year. In the process, her cursed cocktail of cutting misanthropy, privilege blindness, and stubborn superiority quickly reveals itself as a carefully constructed mask, one meant to keep her even darker feelings of isolation, inadequacy, and grief at bay. Still, like featured artist Addison Rae on the eventual toned-down “Von dutch” remix, her screams linger beneath the surface.
The Song: “Nasty” by Tinashe
The Book: Paradise Rot by Jenny Hval, translated by Marjam Idriss (Verso, 2018)
“Is somebody gonna match my freak? Is somebody gonna match my nasty?”
They’re questions Norwegian artist Jenny Hval was asking herself long before Tinashe’s “Nasty” cemented them in the public consciousness. In fact, she’s likely been asking these questions for the last 15 years, since her debut novel, Perlebryggeriet (published in English as Paradise Rot) hit shelves in her home country in 2009.
Beyond her penchant for the avant-garde, where plots and reality are both loosely structured, Hval is also a proponent of the viscerally nasty. Both of her full-length novels—Paradise Rot and 2020’s Girls Against God—revel in body horror, and sometimes just in bodies themselves, the rawest, most natural forms of them.
Hval’s (welcome) nastiness is on full display in Paradise Rot, which zooms in on the sexual awakening of a young queer woman studying abroad. Filled to the brim with Hval’s signature focus on the raw, exposed body, Paradise Rot incorporates elements of horror with threads of eroticism for a sensual, delightfully rotten take on the coming of age. Perhaps only Hval can match her own nasty.
The Song: “Challengers” by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross (from the original score of Challengers)
The Book: The Guest by Emma Cline (Random House, 2023)
If It Girl albums and It Girl novels dominate the summer, it stands to reason that there are It Girl films. If so, there’s no doubt that this summer’s It Girl film is Challengers. From Call Me By Your Name director Luca Guadagnino, the sexy, sensual, tennis drama about, in Guadagnino’s words, “a love triangle where all corners touch,” seemed to overtake the cultural discourse even before its delayed release this April. And much like Brat, Challengers surpassed even its most ambitious indie movie expectations, raking in over $80 million globally in a weeks-long box office run.
But for all its strengths—across-the-board career best, star-making performances included—the success of Challengers truly hinges on its techno-inspired score. Unsurprisingly, composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross delivered: their score creates a sense of lightning speed, edge-of-your-seat anxiety that keeps the audience hooked until the final shot.
A year before Challengers, Emma Cline crafted that same fast-paced anxiety in The Guest. The novel begins with Alex, its grifter protagonist, finding herself suddenly homeless in the Hamptons after falling out with her wealthy boyfriend. Determined not to return to New York, Alex resolves to stay in the land of the elite, whatever it takes. For the rest of The Guest’s week-long plot, Alex is simultaneously in a mad dash for survival and floating through a state of denial about her circumstances, the dread lingering beneath Cline’s captivating prose growing stronger all the while.
In the end, the success of both Challengers and The Guest hinges on their masterful use of anxiety, oscillating between eager anticipation and outright dread. Will Alex’s growing list of troubles truly resolve themselves by the end of the summer, or will her meticulous scheme unravel before she can find an escape route? Will either tennis boyfriend’s dedication to the game lead them to the same kind of life-changing catastrophe as their lover before them? Or will something else come of their obsession with competition? Until we know for sure, it feels impossible to look away—and we may never know entirely for sure.
The Song: “LUNCH” by Billie Eilish
The Book: Carmilla by J. Sheridan Le Fanu (Lanternfish Press Clockwork Editions, 2019)
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Collages by the author
This can be considered both adjacent to and often overlapping with the alienated young woman canon.
See also: anyone who enjoyed Halina Reijn’s A24 horror comedy Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022) because they felt in on the joke.
A song that, for what it’s worth, pairs best with Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.
Near-constant references to doing party drugs with Gabbriette be damned.
Though The Coin feels like the natural pick, a case could be made for Miranda July’s All Fours or Rachel Cusk’s Parade, published in May and June respectively. Other major contenders, like Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux) and Coco Mellors’s Blue Sisters (Random House), won’t release stateside until the fall.