Seventeenth Summer was written in 1942. Maureen Daly was in college when she wrote it; the author bio at the end of the book (which must be the original) charmingly remarks that because she was so young, Daly "recaptured with extraordinary freshness and sensitivity an experience that, because of its very nature, no older author can touch." I could point to some contemporary YA fiction written by fully-grown adults that would contradict that statement, but whatever. I really wanted to focus on the 1942 thing. The cover to the left is the one I have, from a 2010 printing. It looks like the cover of any Sarah Dessen or Deb Caletti book and hides the 70(!)-some years separating it from those contemporary authors. Of course, that age gap becomes almost immediately clear when you actually start reading - you are shoved headlong into the 40's, where cigarette smoking was de rigueur among teenagers, where kissing was risque, where people seriously debated the necessity of bread delivery, since so many people were still baking their own bread. It's kind of like Mad Men, without the self-awareness and wink-wink sexism (I like Mad Men and I can't wait to get caught up on the fifth season, but pushed up against something like this, actually created in a past decade, it can seem rather painfully artificial).
For the most part, I found Seventeenth Summer to be old-fashioned without becoming dated, which is a compliment. It is sweet without being saccharine, and Daly makes moments of Angie and Jack's fairly chaste courtship seem just as breathless as any contemporary YA romance. Though their relationship is innocent, the book itself is surprisingly sensual. It is as much a story about a season in a very specific place as it is about a teenage romance during that season. Angie and Jack's romance is linked to the natural world, growing and ripening just like summer tomatoes. Jack and Angie's first conversation happens in the vegetable garden in early June: "The little tomato plants were laid flat against the ground from last night's downfall and there were puddles like blue glass in the hollows." Their early relationship is as fragile and fresh and miraculous as those new vegetable plants. And it ends where it began - on a late-August night, with frost predicted, Jack and Angie go out to salvage as many tomatoes as they can:
Most of the green leaves were dead and the knobby vines were already wet with night dew. We worked side by side, not talking at first, feeling about in the half-darkness for the tomatoes, and soon our hands were wet to the wrists and the rough wool of my sweater chafed. Even my fingers felt stiff. But somehow it was so natural to be working beside Jack that I didn't want to stop, even for a moment.
I really enjoyed how grounded this book was. The way Daly describes those different hallmarks of summer - how the lake changes as the summer wears on, eating wild grapes in the dark, the arrival of the swallows on the telephone wire heralding the end of summer - made me feel summer. I can't really explain beyond saying that it reminded me in that way of Lauren Oliver's Delirium, which I assure you is a high compliment (it wasn't just the sensuality - Oliver's world is also incredibly chaste, though for sci-fi reasons). It also made me a little sad that my sense of time passing is not as linked to the natural world (though feeling of seeing the swallows on the telephone wire was achingly familiar). By the by, it also reminded me of Barbara Kingsolver's Animal Vegetable Miracle. All three books transported me, in a very specific way...and I can't explain it any better than that.(We won't write analyses in this class I'll be taking, but if we did, this might be the book I'd choose to write about, with a focus on the parallels between Jack and Angie's relationship and the evolution of summer.)
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