Abreu is a literary tour de force—only twenty-seven, she has already been named by Granta Magazine as one of the twenty-five most promising young writers in the Spanish language. Published in Spain in 2020 as Panza de Burro, Dogs of Summer has now been translated into sixteen languages, with plans for a future on-screen adaptation. The story of two young girls growing up in a working-class neighborhood in the Canary Islands, near the volcano of northern Tenerife, invites comparisons with Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet. Tenerife in 2005 offers a vivid depiction of early aughts girlhood that captures the precarity of puberty and the intrusion of the outside world within an isolated community, most notably through the growing impact technology has on everyday life. Unlike Ferrante, Abreu doesn’t shy away from the grittier aspects of girlhood—rather, she revels in all their glory. In “Pic of My Organs from the Inside,” a long prose poem published in Astra Magazine and written in the form of a list, and also translated by Sanches, she presents an unflinching “gut check”— she’s in pain from the dentist and a UTI, she feels alienated by her partner and ghosted by another lover, and she reveals all her recent internet searches. This radical honesty is mirrored in Dogs of Summer, an intimate portrait of girlhood friendship that treads the often precarious waters of obsession, codependence, and sexual violence.
Isora and the narrator—who she affectionately calls “Shit”—are best friends, yet affection, cruelty, jealousy, longing, and even desire coexist in their friendship. Together, the girls attempt to hitchhike to the beach, steal junk food, act out depraved storylines with their Barbies, and spin around in circles until they become so dizzy they collapse. The narrator sometimes envies Isora, who she perceives as more vivacious and confident. In turn, she’ll do almost anything Isora asks, no matter how risky, disgusting, or dangerous: “I’d have followed her to the toilet or to the mouth of a volcano. I’d have peered over the edge until I saw the dormant fire, until I felt the vulcano’s dormant fire inside me.” The girls use each other to act out their physical and sexual desires: Isora’s grandmother has her on a diet that forces her to constantly vomit up her food, so the narrator gorges herself on cakes because Isora wants to watch. Their mutual codependence causes the narrator to question whether she wants Isora as her friend, wants to be her, or wants her: “There were times when I got jealous of Isora. I liked the color of her arms and her hair. I liked her handwriting.”
This intensity of friendship sometimes tips over into burgeoning erotic desire. The narrator is hyperaware of her friend’s body—her growing breasts, the fact that she already has hair on her vulva. The narrator recognizes that she is supposed to desire boys—she acts out romantic storylines with her dolls and colludes with Isora as she sexts an older boy over instant messenger in computer class. “Boys grossed me out,” she admits, “but I thought I was supposed to fall in love with them.” This combination of disgust and desire manifests in her intimate relationship with her friend’s body. She painfully realizes that Isora is growing up faster, but admits that her own sexual desire is fixated on her friend: “Then I’d look at Isora and think about how I couldn’t touch her the way other girls touched and hugged, but maybe I could touch her in ways dat havnt evn been invntd, stroke the backs of her knees with my hand or run my fingers along the scabs that edged her toenails or rub the rolls of flesh that stuck out over her panties.”
Dogs of Summer is a rare depiction of the eroticism of queer girlhood, one that veers between flourishing sexuality and the intensity of childhood friendship. The narrator and Isora “had been grinding on things ever since we were small,” masturbating with clothespins, crayons, and doll heads. In a pivotal scene, they try on Isora’s dead mother’s underwear and grind together on her bed. Yet the narrator is aware of the casual homophobia underpinning her community, which she and Isora participate in by nicknaming the neighbor’s effeminate son Juanito “Juanita Banana”; queer sexuality is therefore intertwined with the threat of violence. In a narrative style that mirrors prose poetry, the narrator feels “the urge to squeeze her [Isora’s] hand and twist it until all her fingers popped out of their sockets until her hands were just gone sometimes i hated her and wanted to destroy her.” Isora “was my best friend i wanted to be like her,” but the narrator also wants to kiss her and “suck up isora’s head so I’d have her inside my body.” As much as she desires her, however, the narrator also wants to preserve their innocence, sensing that her friend is growing up at a pace that eclipses her: “Isora was somewhere else, I realized, somewhere I couldn’t even see the beginning of, and for a second I felt scared.” The girls’ friendship is eventually threatened by a climactic incident of sexual violence, the repercussions of which threaten to forever split them apart.
Much of the novel’s staying power arise from the narrator’s vivid, realistic, and compelling voice. The narrator is a ten-year-old who actually sounds ten, unlike other pensive, reflective fictional children written by adults, even as she grapples with eroticism or violence. She and Isora create their own language, mixing Canary Islands working-class vernacular, childish patterns of speech, bachata lyrics, and textspeak. Refrigerators become “fridgerators,” sunscreen becomes “sunscream.” She and Isora “supsect” the wealthy “foreners” who inhabit the vacation homes around them, homes that are cleaned by the women in their family. Sometimes Isora orders the narrator to record lyrics in their “SsOoOngG BoOoKkk” and “I’d write out the line in my own way: whoever invntd luv shoulda left instrukshons on how 2 not get hurt.” The prose fluctuates between instant messages and prose poetry, such as the narrator’s rambling and vibrant description of Isora: “isora had green eyes like the greenest green like a fly sat on a tuna salad sandwich in august on a beach in teno like a drained bottle of wine… isora had round tits that sprang out of her like when the earth spits up a flower that’s small at first then big the dry earth of her breasts.” There is a sense that the narrator is struggling to vocalize the intensity of her thoughts, only gradually grappling with what they mean.
The project of translation is especially significant in a novel that depends so heavily on the nuances of its prose. The novel’s original Spanish title, Panza de Burro, translates as “donkey’s belly,” an idiomatic expression from the Canary Islands describing the low-hanging, soupy clouds that gather oppressively over the northern region of Tenerife. Such locational nuance would likely be lost on an English-speaking audience, so translator Julia Sanches has chosen Dogs of Summer, an allusion to the languorous and stifling “dog days of summer.” We might wonder, however, what has been lost in the translation of Isora and the narrator’s idiosyncratic speech. Spanish expressions like “miniña” and “gofio” pepper the novel, giving a sense of Abreu’s prose. Despite Sanches’s vibrant translation, it’s difficult not to imagine what might be missing from the vitality of the original text, whose language and speech is inextricably grounded in its specific location and cultural era.
Dogs of Summer is lyrical and vivid, yet its poetic language is intertwined with a prescient sense of danger and brutality. Abreu does not shy away from the violent and frightening aspects of sexual awakening; rather, she foregrounds them with an intensity that is sometimes painful. Perhaps one of the earliest glimpses at early aughts coming-of-age by a young writer and a rare, startling depiction of queer girlhood sexuality, Dogs of Summer resists nostalgia and sentimentality while preserving the freshness and vibrancy of the narrator’s voice. The fever pitch of the novel captures the commingled intimacy, fear, and disgust that arises with our first intimate relationships, in which desire becomes indistinguishable from sexual violence. Dogs of Summer is a portrait not only of survival, but also of growth into our bodies and our relationships with others.
