In advance of our BookEnds BookClub on Wednesday, April 5, featuring program alum Daisy Alpert Florin and her debut novel MY LAST INNOCENT YEAR (Holt, 2023) in conversation with her BookEnds mentor and co-founding director Susan Scarf Merrell, alum Rachel León considers the validation of reviews and the power of opening lines.
For many writers, to have our work raved about in The New York Times is a landmark feat, a universally-recognized indication of success. The BookEnds community was thrilled to see alum Daisy Alpert Florin’s debut novel My Last Innocent Year receive such laudatory coverage from reviewer Elisabeth Egan, who writes “My Last Innocent Year is a heartfelt chronicle of a writer who realizes that her stories about girls with feelings matter every bit as much as the ones written by the guy who annotates The New Yorker.”
My Last Innocent Year centers the protagonist, Isabel Rosen, during her final semester at a prestigious East Coast college as she falls into a relationship with her professor. Set in the late 90s against the backdrop of the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal, it’s atmospheric and beautiful, a smart and masterfully written novel that examines consent, the cost of our mistakes, and how we reckon with our past.
Egan points out how richly layered My Last Innocent Year is—the multiple threads that are woven throughout the story. And while, yes, the story itself is meticulously plotted, one of the things not noted is the attention to detail on the line level, attention we see from the novel’s very first line:
“It’s hard to say how I ended up in Zev Neman’s dorm room the night before winter break.”
This sentence does so much work. It establishes Isabel as the kind of conscientious narrator who wants to get this story right, yet admits the fallibility of her account. This is not a narrator who will manipulate the reader. She won’t lie or stretch the truth. But Isabel is relying on her memory to share her account, and memory is inherently flawed.
The first line also sets up the opening scene, in which the facts of the events can be debated by readers. It’s clearly a nonconsensual sexual encounter; does that mean it’s rape? Zev could be described as a friend; can one be assaulted by a friend? The temporal distance from which Isabel narrates this story forces the reader to consider the limitations of how our culture talked about sexual assault and consent twenty-five years ago, and continues to debate it today. We live in a culture that still blames women victims of sexual assault for “asking for it” if they are wearing clothes that are tight or revealing, if they drink heavily around men, or if they go to a man’s bedroom, as Isabel does. So this one sentence situates the novel’s themes, from the very first line.
From there the novel builds to a crescendo. My Last Innocent Year has gotten a lot of buzz for being a literary page-turner that prompts important cultural conversations. Its themes and smart craft choices make it a perfect book club novel, and The BookEnds Book Club event on April 5th one not to miss.
But what ultimately makes My Last Innocent Year such an incredible success isn’t as easily measured. As Daisy told me in a mini-interview on my Substack, she wrote the book she wanted to read. She didn’t rush, she took the time she needed to write this remarkable novel. And in the end, that’s the greatest success we should all hope to achieve.
Rachel León is a writer, editor, and social worker. She serves as Daily Editor for Chicago Review of Books. Her work has appeared in Catapult, BOMB Magazine, The Millions, Electric Literature, and elsewhere.