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Seventeenth Summer by Maureen Daly
Module 1-What is YA? Classics
Bibliography
Daly, Maureen. Seventeenth Summer. New York: Simon Pulse, 2010. ISBN 978-1-4169-9463-3
Critical Analysis
Maureen Daly creates an honest tale of a young girl's first experiences with adult life. Readers follow Angie over the three short months after she graduates from high school in the 1940's and ultimately say goodbye when she leaves Fond du Lac, IL to attend college in Chicago with one of her older sisters. Young Angie is unexpectedly mature as she fulfills many roles. Daly develops all of them equally well. Readers will be touched at how Angie is gentle and dutiful as an older sister as well as a younger sister. She respectfully keeps secrets and lovingly sacrifices her own desires to ensure her sisters feel valued. In keeping with the theme of "falling in love for the first time", Angie learns about peer pressure, social expectations and her own morality as she navigates through her feelings for Jack and her hopes for her future. Daly introduces Jack with such detail that readers will smell the smoke from his cigarette and hear the rumble of his delivery truck as they anxiously await the inevitable summer’s end. Daly has been able to accurately share the perspective, point of view and period of the 1940’s with young adults of each era since the novel’s original publication in 1942. Young adults today can most certainly relate to the social taboos, yearnings for intimacy, heartaches that come when trust is broken, the desperate hope that will love last against all odds and distances and the journey of self-discovery that Angie and Jack experienced that summer long ago. This classic novel is a strong, honest, easy flowing narrative with accurate verbiage and interests for the period. Because it is an emotional expression of conflicts and reflections, it is a novel lacking action and some readers may not find in engaging.
Book Hook
It was just one summer. How could it have meant so much? Before she met Jack, Angie didn’t believe that three months was enough time to fall in love. But once he looked at her and she saw him smile, her heart knew that three months would never be enough time to spend with him.
“I realized then with a half- proud, half- ashamed feeling, that Jack was a better boy than I was a girl.” (Daly 1942, 122)
External Assessments
Publishers Weekly
College-bound Angie Morrow falls in love for the first time in the perennially popular Seventeenth Summer by Maureen Daly (1942), written while the author was still in college herself. Diary-like entries depict the trials and tribulations of adolescent amour. Ages 12-up. Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Book Review: New to Me–Seventeenth Summer
The Hub
2011 February 3
www.yalsa.ala.org/.../book-review-new-to-me-seventeenth-summer
Seventeenth Summer certainly feels like a book of its time. Yet in exploring the near-universal experience of first love, it manages to retain a sense of freshness. It won’t appeal to every reader, but those dreamy, romantic teens who want a clean romance will find much to enjoy. Melissa Rabey
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