My Last Innocent Year by Daisy Alpert FlorinMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
This is a story looking back to the late 1990s when the main character, Isabel Rosen, finished up her senior year at a small college. She is studying writing, while finding her way in life. The book starts with a sexual encounter with a male friend, that Isabel was very lukewarm about engaging in, but didn’t make her feelings known either. It wasn’t good, and when she returns to her dorm her feminist roommate makes it out like it was rape.
With this sets up for the book one may expect more, yet this subject is glossed over more than examined. Then we have Isabel getting into a sexual relationship with a visiting professor. There are other heavy topics in the book, such as stealing, and class differences, and being Jewish, but are all dealt with very lightly. I would have expected much more.
There are some good turns of phrases in the book, the writer seems to know what she is doing, yet the content fell short. It felt like the writer had something to say about all these topics but didn’t know how to do it exactly, and instead of focusing on one thing, threw in more, such as the stealing. That came up so late in the book, I probably shouldn’t even have mentioned it.
There are even more topics than I mentioned. Anyway, I appreciated some of the quality of writing and maybe the next book will be a stellar one. This one wasn’t too bad, just fell short for me.
With this sets up for the book one may expect more, yet this subject is glossed over more than examined. Then we have Isabel getting into a sexual relationship with a visiting professor. There are other heavy topics in the book, such as stealing, and class differences, and being Jewish, but are all dealt with very lightly. I would have expected much more.
There are some good turns of phrases in the book, the writer seems to know what she is doing, yet the content fell short. It felt like the writer had something to say about all these topics but didn’t know how to do it exactly, and instead of focusing on one thing, threw in more, such as the stealing. That came up so late in the book, I probably shouldn’t even have mentioned it.
There are even more topics than I mentioned. Anyway, I appreciated some of the quality of writing and maybe the next book will be a stellar one. This one wasn’t too bad, just fell short for me.
Original short post:
There is some good writing here, but the story fell a little short. The set-up was there, but it wasn't followed through.
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