Thank you to  Henry Holt and Co. and Netgalley for an advanced readers copy of My Last Innocent Year.

 I have so many thoughts and feeling about Isabel and her story. This is an amazing debut novel by  Daisy Alpert Florin.

Set during the late nineties you follow a young women entering into her last semester of college. After having a nonconsensual sexual encounter Isabel begins processing the events of that night.  In the midst of processing her abuse she begins to have an affair with her English professor who sees her as an equal. Isabel is also starting to see there is very thin line between youth and adulthood.

This is a character driven, true coming of story and something I would love for every college aged person to read. Isabel is truly searching for her place and voice in the world during her last semester in college. Throughout  the story you can tell this is someone recounting their own life events. The author adds in information about characters as they come and go. She builds that feeling we all have in college, young, connected and almost invincible but fragile.

This could have easily become trauma-porn for the author to write. Instead they took a time in history when sexual assault was finally being addressed in colleges and a character who represented women who were learning how to process their abuse. 
Isabel's abuse and affair opens her eyes to gray reality of life. Even the commentary Daisy (the author) has about the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal can be compared to Isabel and her own affair.

Isabel begins to question life markers on when girls become women. Are there milestones? How can we tell if we truly have agency over our lives?
 
I have far too many thoughts on this book. I truly would have loved reading this at age fifteen or seventeen just like I did reading it now at twenty-two, a college grade.



I want to end with one of my favorite quotes form the book.

 

we were girls in the bodies of women. We bought condoms with our father's credit cards, drank sloe gin fizzes and slept with stuffed animals on our beds. We didn't know how to fold a fitted sheet