Daisy Alpert Florin

A Novel

My Last Innocent Year

Maria Buitrago

 Men admire each other when they are at their best, but women enjoy meeting each other in pits of despair. 

An incisive, deeply resonant debut novel about a nonconsensual sexual encounter that propels one woman’s final semester at an elite New England college into controversy and chaos—and into an ill-advised affair with a married professor

It’s the winter of 1998 and Isabel Rosen has one semester left at Wilder College, a prestigious school in New Hampshire with a wealthy, elite student body and the sort of picturesque buildings college brochures were invented to capture. The only daughter of a Lower East Side appetizing store owner, Isabel has always felt out of place at Wilder, and the death of her mother shortly before she arrived on campus left her feeling unmoored in a way that’s proven hard to shake. Now, right as she’s coming to believe she’s finally found her place, the fallout from a nonconsensual sexual encounter with one of the only other Jewish students on campus leaves Isabel reeling.

Enter R.H. Connelly: a once-famous poet and Isabel’s married writing professor, a man with secrets of his own. Connelly makes Isabel feel seen, beautiful, talented; the woman she longs to become. His belief in her ignites a belief in herself. The two begin an affair that shakes the foundation of who Isabel thinks she is, for better and worse.

Set against the backdrop of the Clinton and Lewinsky scandal, My Last Innocent Year is a coming-of-age story about a young woman on the brink of sexual and artistic awakening, navigating her way toward independence while recognizing the power, beauty and grit of where she came from. Timely and wise, it reckons with the complexities of consent, what it means to be an adult, and whether or not we can ever outrun our bad decisions.

this read like a bunch of anecdotes from women all tied up into one letter and i really liked it

Danyella Barajas

This story about Isabelle, in her final year of college, examines what consent is and the power that older men  hold over younger women. It was a hard story to read, but it was well-written. I tend to compare all of these stories to My Dark Vanessa, and this one didn’t pack quite the punch of that novel.

Cheri McElroy

Emily Perkovich

If this was the first student/teacher affair I had read, I think I would have given this five stars. But ultimately, this isn’t a new story, which is absolutely fine with me, there just also isn’t anything to make it stand out. Towards the end, I started to really strongly dislike the narrator because she does not seem to have actually grown at all. She’s still a spoiled brat unable to examine her uncertainties, despite constantly pretending to self evaluate. Ok, she has a “do the right thing” moment (I won’t say which situation she is addressing to avoid spoilers), but she doesn’t do it because she has a grand realization. She does it because her father attempts to teach her a lesson that she blindly follows without seeming to actually learn anything. I am not a person that feels like a story has to have a teachable moment or a larger metaphor, I just didn’t want to end this still hating what a little narcissist the narrator is. 

There is a moment, that for me was a standout, towards the end of the text, where Isabelle describes the way the affair planted a seed that would always be there, and that was a situation/scene that I greatly appreciated. It felt different from other books like this, as it created a sort of self acceptance, which doesn’t seem to frequently be the resolution in this trope.

Thank you to NetGalley and Henry Holt for the ARC

megan becker

It felt like this wanted to be a character study, no plot just vibes kind of novel - but it never went deep enough into the protagonists psyche to make it there. It kept me in the story well enough that I blew through it, but it was more like I was floating above it that actually grabbed & kept there. It feels like it is just on the precipice of something, but lacked the emotional punch it seemed to promise.

My Last Innocent Year A Novel

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