Our Last Summer: LGBTQ+ Summer Camp Romance

Good boys spend the summer at home.
Bad boys get sent away to become “real men.”

When sixteen-year-old Eli is shipped off to a remote leadership camp for “discipline,” he understands the message clearly: fix yourself.

The camp promises strength, structure, and character.
No weakness. No softness. No excuses.

Especially not feelings for another boy.

Miles from home, cut off from everything familiar, Eli is told that masculinity is something you earn through obedience and silence. But when he meets Marcus — guarded, steady, impossible to ignore — the rules begin to fracture. Because the one thing the camp cannot control is what happens when someone sees you clearly for the first time.

Then wildfire tears through the forest.

Evacuation exposes more than just poor leadership. Power turns cruel. Secrets become leverage. And when authority threatens to define him before he can define himself, Eli faces a choice that follows him home:

Stay quiet and stay “good.”
Or say the truth and risk losing the only family he has.

Set between smoke-filled nights and suffocating suburban kitchens, this emotionally intense YA novel explores queer first love, toxic masculinity, parental control, and the quiet rebellion of boys who refuse to be reshaped.

Because sometimes becoming a “real man” means refusing to become someone else.

Tropes: found family, queer summer camp, forbidden boys romance, emotional slow burn MM, identity vs family pressure.