The Debut Review: MY LAST INNOCENT YEAR (9/28/22)

Deeply powerful and incisive, MY LAST INNOCENT YEAR is a timely coming-of-age story about a young woman in her final year of college. After a nonconsensual sexual encounter with one of her friends, she finds herself falling into an ill-advised affair with a married professor. As she grapples with expectations from her father, the ups and downs of her friendships, and secrets that aren’t hers to keep, Isabel begins to discover that the line between youth and adulthood is fuzzier than she originally believed.

We are joined today by Daisy Alpert Florin with a letter to librarians diving into the book and how libraries were not just an important place in her debut, but also in her life.

MY LAST INNOCENT YEAR is available for download on Edelweiss know more. LibraryReads votes are due by January 1st.

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Dear Librarians,

I couldn’t very well write a novel set on a college campus without including scenes in a library. I attended a college that had a beautiful library, similar to the one described in MY LAST INNOCENT YEAR, and one of my favorite parts about writing this novel was the chance to recreate and revisit the spaces that meant so much to me. To me, the library was where college life really happened, the place where our academic and social lives collided. We studied, yes, but always with the possibility of connection.

When I was a student in the 1990s, the decade during which MY LAST INNOCENT YEAR is set, the
library was where you went when you wanted to find someone. In the days before text
messaging made it possible to track down friends with pinpoint accuracy, you’d have to find
them yourself, usually in the library. You came to understand people’s patterns that way: who
liked to study in the reserve corridor with its long tables and fluorescent lighting and who
preferred the wingback chairs in the English department reading room where they served high
tea. When we were seniors, the luckiest of us were assigned study carrels and after that, we
could always be found.

The library is an important place for Isabel, my main character. It’s where she retreats during
times of stress and where she goes to gossip with friends. It’s also the setting for an early,
charged encounter with Connelly, the married professor who will become her lover. Even before
their affair begins, Isabel is already a little bit in love with him, having read the poems that made
him famous–where else?–in the library. 

Today, I’m lucky to live in a town with a wonderful library. I wrote much of this novel there, sitting
at a long wooden table facing the street, conjuring the past. Freed from the demands of my
everyday life, the library was where I went to imagine myself a writer, one who might have a
book of her own on the shelves one day. 

Fondly,
Daisy Alpert Florin