A remarkable coming-of-age story that examines sexual politics, power and lust and the sometimes murky nature of romantic encounters ... The unfortunate final section, with contemporary Isabel trying to track down Connelly all these years later, serves no real purpose. But those confusing pages do not detract from the power of the rest of the narrative.
At its heart, My Last Innocent Year is a campus novel, and it hits many of the same notes as classics of the genre ... By the end of Florin’s masterful bildungsroman, our narrator is not somebody’s daughter, she is not someone’s victim, she is not someone’s lover. She is Isabel, and she defines her own story.
An intimate, insightful novel ... My Last Innocent Year is written with confessional intimacy verging on stream-of-consciousness storytelling. It’s softly delivered coming-of-age themes pertain to such questions as individuality versus conformity, desire versus boundaries, and passion versus practicality along the road of growing into one’s own. Sure to please YA readers and well beyond, it’s a poignant tale that doesn’t shy from sharp edges, a universal story both timeless and timely.
Florin conveys Isabel’s experiences and their era dexterously in this wise campus novel ... Readers will be rapt and pierced by a young woman’s uphill battle, even in all her brilliance, to believe that she can be the ultimate witness to her own life.
An immersive if overly polished campus novel ... Florin does great work exploring the era’s murky sexual politics, but the prose is burnished to the point of feeling stilted, and a post-college section feels a bit rushed. While sterile, this throwback has its moments.
Florin’s prose is gorgeous and enthralling, and her imagistic portrayal of New England campus life—from divey college town bars to Winter Carnival to English department parties to skinny-dipping in the river—is pitch-perfect. She also succeeds where many stories of dubious sexual consent fail: She avoids heavy-handed moralizing in favor of ambiguity, however uncomfortable. Even an odd final section, which spans years after Isabel graduates and detracts from the momentum of what would otherwise have been the final act, cannot dim the shine of this novel. Florin’s debut is not to be missed ... A brilliantly crafted campus novel for the generation before #MeToo.
