Goodbye Summer

by Alison Prince

144 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1983

Reviews

[Dorian · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is kind of an odd book. It's about one summer in a seventeen-year-old girl's life. She gets a summer job, and gets fired, and falls in love, and realises he's not good for her, and learns things about her family and herself, and starts on the road to fulfilling her dream...and then it all just sort of peters out. There's no actual defined plot, and no resolution. It's very much a slice of life.

I like it, though. Sasha is very seventeen, arrogant at times, wanting everything black-and-white, full of ideals, finding real life doesn't work the way it "ought" to. And I can totally see why she falls for Nick, who is dreadfully attractive and, as she realises, thoroughly unsuitable (and not in the way her mother means the term, except when that's exactly it). And the dead-end, there's-nothing-you-can-do, nothing's-going-to-change feeling of the mid-1980s is so strongly evoked - reading this book is in some way like stepping into a time machine to return to my teenage years.

Basically, it largely fails on story, but excels on characterisation and setting.