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THE LAST SUMMER (OF YOU & ME) by Ann Brashares
On Sale: May 6th
Paperback
320 pages
ISBN-10: 1594483086
ISBN-13: 9781594483080
From the author of the multimillion-copy, #1 bestselling series The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants comes a heartbreaking first adult novel.
Set on
Long Island's Fire Island, THE LAST SUMMER (OF YOU & ME) is an enchanting, heartrending
page-turner about sisterhood, friendship, love, loss, and growing up. It is the
story of a beach community friendship triangle --- Riley and Alice, two sisters
in their twenties, and Paul, the young man they've grown up with --- and what
happens one summer when budding love, sexual curiosity, a sudden serious illness,
and a deep secret all collide, launching the friends into an adult world from
which their summer haven can no longer protect them.
Ann Brashares
is the author of the young adult novels THE SISTERHOOD OF THE TRAVELING PANTS,
THE SECOND SUMMER OF THE SISTERHOOD, GIRLS IN PANTS and FOREVER BLUE. THE LAST SUMMER (OF YOU & ME) is her first novel for adults.
Sisters Alice
and Riley have always spent summers in a close-knit community on New York's Fire
Island. Next to their ugly, cozy little house, Paul summers in his mansion with
a different housekeeper every year. The three have formed a family over the years
throughout their childhood and adolescence.
Now, as young adults, they
are together once again as Paul returns to the island after an absence of several
years. Alice, who has always loved him wholeheartedly, continues to adore him.
And Paul is uncomfortably aware of his burgeoning feelings toward Alice. Both
are sensitive to the fact that, if the two of them began a romantic relationship,
tomboy Riley would be left out in the cold. Riley, more skilled at childhood talents,
lacks many of the arts of adult socialization yet is far from stupid --- and she
realizes there are strong hidden feelings between her younger sister and quasi-brother.
Meanwhile, as Alice and Paul perform an ornate "tiny step forward, large
step backward" courtship dance, Riley uncharacteristically falls ill. Paul's manipulative
and cold mother, Lia, adds to the tension by arriving unexpectedly, packing along
her usual burden of unhappiness and tainting Paul's pleasure at being back on
the island with Alice and Riley. But Lia is not the only outside force to disturb
a relationship already torn asunder by internal issues.
While Paul struggles
with feelings that adult intimacy with the girl who was so close to being his
sister would be wrong, Alice remains clear that it is the one and only romantic
relationship she has ever wanted. Paul moves close to her, then backs away while
Alice is ripped apart by frustration and despair. He wonders if taking that final
step will tear him into tiny pieces or make him whole; she wonders if he might
come as close to her as possible only to back away and break her heart.
And, aside from all this, there is Riley. How does she fit in this strange new
world? An inevitable-seeming yet alarming plot twist finally trumps the many tribulations
and joys of Paul and Alice's relationship, as the characters learn yet again that
heartbreak comes in many forms.
I was quickly drawn into this leisurely
paced, subtle tale of intertwining relationships, a fascinating study of divided
loyalties, secrets, guilt, self-punishment and desperate, yearning love. Although
Paul's family feels less well developed (his mother seems a bit like a cartoon
character), Alice and Riley's family members, with their imperfect yet loving
personalities and relationships, feel real and sympathetic. In addition, Ann Brashares's
love letter to island life sets a haunting, nostalgic atmosphere, making THE LAST
SUMMER (OF YOU & ME) a perfect summer read.
--- Reviewed by Terry Miller
Shannon
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here now to buy this book from Amazon.com.
A
Conversation with Ann Brashares, author of THE LAST SUMMER (OF YOU & ME)
Q. Why did you decide to write your first adult novel after the spectacular
success of your The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series for young
adult readers?
A. I had the pleasure of raising the girls in the
Traveling Pants novels from the first taste of freedom at 16, to nearly complete
freedom four years later. But as a writer I felt ready to keep growing, to find
myself some more freedom still. I felt I had pushed the maturity of the young
adult category as far as I sensibly could.
Q. What is your new novel
about?
A. It's about two sisters and a young man and the life
they've shared on a small island summer community. Now, after a few years apart,
they've come back together as adults and are forced to revisit those old relationships
and to challenge the rules they'd made for themselves as children.
Q.
Both sisterhood and friendship are key themes in this book, and in particular,
friendship between sisters. Do you think sisters Riley and Alice's relationship
is unusual?
A. The range of sibling relationships is so wide,
it's hard to call any unusual. These two girls are very different. They represent,
in a way, different stages of life and also the natural division of qualities
that often seems to happen between siblings. (I'll be this, you'll be that.) They
respect, almost idolize, each other's differences, which I realize does not always
happen between sisters.
Q. How much of yourself did you put into these
characters? How much are you like the two very different sisters in the book,
Alice and Riley? And how about Paul, for that matter?
A. In fiction,
as in dreams I think, we fracture ourselves into several different people. I think
I'm probably not like any one of the characters individually, but very much a
combination of the three.
Q. What is the history of your relationship
to Fire Island, New York, where your novel is set? How much did the actual place
inspire the novel? Did you write it while you were there?
A. I
first visited Fire Island when I was in college. I arrived at night, and it seemed
to me an otherworldly place. I can still summon up that feeling sometimes. Or
at least I try to. We own a house there now and my husband and I and our children
spend our summers on the beach.
I first imagined this book while walking
along Lighthouse Promenade on a rainy afternoon. I developed and wrote part of
it on the island, but it's a notorious feature of the island that though it inspires,
it's hard to get any real work done there.
Q. There are a number of
secrets that drive the story in this book. Without disclosing what they are, why
do these characters withhold the truth from one another, even though they love
one another deeply?
A. What's a novel without secrets?
But really, I think these characters were effortlessly honest with one another
as children. Now they have all these feelings and desires that they feel they
can't share and that cause them shame. They've been cast out of innocence and
they realize they are naked. Naturally they are trying to cover themselves up.
Q. Would you say that the ability to tell the truth about yourself
is one of the essential qualities of maturity?
A. I don't think
I would. I might even say that we hide ourselves more and more as we get older,
because our impulses and desires grow more complicated. That's the plot, I guess.
But indeed the resolution requires the acquisition of self-knowledge. You need
to tell the truth to yourself, if not about yourself.
Maybe it's another
example of the diapers to diapers, gums to gums phenomenon. We are most honest
about ourselves when we are very young or very old.
Q. The fear that
the choices one makes in life will cut one off from one's past, and from the people
from that time in one's life, is a concern for young people as they enter adulthood.
This is a central theme of your novel. How would you describe the ideal way to
negotiate that passage?
A. I don't know if there is an ideal way.
These characters don't negotiate it ideally. For them it's the cause of great
suffering.
I think, in general, that people who require less consistency
from themselves, who are comfortable with a more fluid identity, seem to have
an easier time of it. And conversely, it's the people who are most principled
and most stalwart who often struggle the most.
Q. To some extent,
the young people in your novel are suffering from the excesses and mistakes of
their parents, who are members of the sixties generation. How do you think Riley,
Paul and Alice's behaviors and decisions reflect what they've seen in their parents'
lives? Do you think they are part of a larger generational trend?
A.
I think that Riley, Paul, and Alice suffer from an excess of caution, in a way.
Their parents took gigantic risks and made gigantic mistakes. I think they are
scared to live that big or be that stupid. Indeed divorce and infidelity were
so rampant in the seventies and eighties, that the generations to follow (myself
included) are living with the hangover. We are desperate to make good decisions
--- almost paralyzed by the notion of what not to do. Maybe we grow up slower
as a consequence.
Q. Fire Island is a magical, protected world for
these characters as children, and seems to have influenced the people they grew
up to be. Do you think there was something inherent in the place that made it
special, or is it the constancy of having a special place, and friends, to return
to year after year? Is there something particular to summer that makes this happen?
Could the same kind of friendships have formed in a ski town, for instance?
A. There are places that seem to stand still, and Fire Island is one of
them. I think a ski town could have that quality as well. These are single-season
places where time does not flow. That is part of the magic, but it can also be
a curse. It's harder to accept change in an unchanging place. It's harder to live
the other seasons, I think, when you've identified so fully with one.
Q. Religion is also a strong background element, especially toward the end
of the story. How important is it to the characters, and to you?
A.
I was a very devout child. I lent my whole imagination to my faith. I was brought
up Catholic, and I felt transported by the aesthetic richness of it. We mostly
went to the hippie mass in the gym where a guy with an acoustic guitar sang "Day
by Day" and "Morning has Broken" a lot, but sometimes we went to the big church,
and it seemed to me the fanciest and most beautiful place on earth. Like Alice
and her family, we were always late and underdressed. My older brother unfailingly
wore a concert t-shirt to church --- usually Black Sabbath or Judas Priest. It's
no wonder we never felt quite welcome there.
I suspect Alice's religious
experience is a bit like mine. She is capable of believing wholeheartedly as a
child, but can't quite square with the tenets of the church later in life.
Q. Which other fiction writers do you like to read? Whom do you admire?
A. I love and admire the work of Thomas Hardy and Jane Austen, Leo Tolstoy
and Marcel Proust. Among my earlier loves were Judy Blume and Colleen McCollough.
Q. Are you working on a new novel? Can you talk about it?
A. Not yet. I've been writing so much for the last year and a half, I just
want to read books and watch movies for a few months. Still, as much as I've yearned
for this break, now that I've got it I suddenly find myself missing writing. Isn't
that the way it goes?
Q. Do you plan to return to writing young adult
fiction? Do you plan to continue writing for adults?
A. I hope
to do both. I admire Judy Blume who's managed to write for and about all different
ages. I hope to take on all sorts of characters and stories and not even worry
too much about whom they are for.
Q. What do you want readers to take
away from THE LAST SUMMER (OF YOU & ME)?
A. I want them to be
absorbed by it, to escape into the world of these characters for a while. I love
the feeling of staying in the mood of a book after I've read the last page. I'd
love for readers to have that experience with this book.
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One
Waiting
Alice waited for Paul on the ferry dock. He'd left a crackly
message on the answering machine saying he'd be coming in on the afternoon boat.
That was like him. He couldn't say the 1:20 or the 3:55. She'd spent too long
staring at the ferry schedule, trying to divine his meaning.
With some
amount of self-hatred, Alice had first walked out onto the dock for the 1:20,
knowing he wouldn't be on it. She'd looked only vaguely at the faces as they emerged
from the boat, assuring herself she wasn't expecting anything. She'd sat with
her bare feet on the bench at the periphery, her book resting on her knees so
she wouldn't have to interact with anyone. I know you're not going to be on it,
so don't think I think you are, she'd told the Paul who lived in her mind. Even
there, under her presumed control, he was teasing and unpredictable.
For the 3:55, she put Vaseline on her lips and brushed her hair. The boat after
that wasn't until 6:10, and though Paul could miss the so-called afternoon ferry,
he couldn't call 6:10 the afternoon.
How often she did attempt to process
his thoughts in her mind. She took his opinions too seriously, remembered them
long after she suspected he'd forgotten them.
It was one thing, trying
to think his thoughts when he was close by, his words offering clues, corrections,
and confirmations by the hour. But three years of silence made for complex interpolations.
It made it harder, and in another way it made it easier. She was freer with his
thoughts. She made them her own, thought them to her liking.
He had missed
two summers. She couldn't imagine how he could do that. Without him, they had
been shadow seasons. Feelings were felt thinly, there and then gone. Memories
were not made. There was nothing new in sitting on this dock, on this or that
wooden bench, watching for his boat to come. In some ways, she was always waiting
for him.
She couldn't picture his face when he was gone. Every summer
he came back wearing his same face that she could not remember.
Absently,
she saw the people on the dock who came, went, and waited. She waved to people
she knew, mostly her parents' friends. She felt the wind blow the pounding sun
off her shoulders. She slowly dug her thumbnail along a plank of the seat, provoking
a splinter but caking up mold and disintegration instead.
When it came
to waiting, Riley always had something else to do. Paul was Riley's best friend.
Alice knew Riley missed him, too, but she said she didn't like waiting. Alice
didn't like it. Nobody did. But Alice was a younger sister. She didn't have the
idea of not doing things because you didn't like them.
She watched for
the ferry, the way it started out as a little white triangle across the bay. When
it wasn't there, she could hardly imagine it. It was never coming. And then it
appeared. It took shape quickly. It was always coming.
She stood. She
couldn't help it. She left her book on the bench with its paper cover fluttering
open in the wind. Would this be him? Was he on there?
She let her hair
out of its elastic. She stretched her tank top down over her hips. She wanted
him to see all of her and also none of her. She wanted him to be dazzled by the
bits and blinded to the whole. She wanted him to see her whole and not in pieces.
She had hopes that were hard to satisfy.
Her legs bounced; her arms clutched
her middle. She saw the approach of the middle-aged woman in a pink sarong who
taught her mother's yoga class.
"Who are you waiting for, Alice?"
Exposed as she was, the friendly question struck Alice as a cruelty.
"No one," Alice lied awkwardly. The woman's tanned face was as familiar to Alice
as the wicker sofa on the screened porch, but that did not mean that Alice knew
her name. She knew the lady's poodle was named Albert and that her yoga class
was heavy on the chanting. In a place like this, as a child you weren't responsible
for the names of grown-ups, though the grown-ups always knew yours. If you were
a child, relationships here began asymmetrically, and there rarely came a specific
opportunity for reevaluation. You bore the same age relationship to people here
no matter how old you got.
The woman looked at Alice's feet, which told
the truth. If you were getting on the 3:55, you wore shoes.
Alice self-consciously
straggled over to the freight area as though she had some purpose there. She didn't
lie easily, and doing it now conferred an unwanted intimacy. She preferred to
save her lies for the people whose names she knew.
She couldn't look
at the boat. She sat back down on the bench, crossing her arms and her legs and
bowing her head.
It was a small village on a small island with customs
and rules all its own. "No keys, no wallet, no shoes" was the saying that expressed
their summer way of life. There were no cars and --- in the old days, at least
--- nobody locked their house. The single place of commerce was the Waterby market,
mostly trading in candy and ice cream cones, where your name was your credit and
they didn't accept cash. Shoes meant you were coming, going, or playing tennis.
Even at the yacht club. Even at parties. There was a community pride in having
feet tough enough to withstand the splintering boardwalks. It's not that you didn't
get splinters --- you always did. You just shut up about it. Every kid knew that.
At the end of each summer, the bottoms and sides of Alice's feet were speckled
black with old splinters. Eventually they disappeared; she was never quite sure
where they went. "They are reabsorbed," a knowledgeable seven-year-old named Sawyer
Boyd told her once.
Everyone's business came through this ferry dock,
with rhythms and hierarchies unlike other places. You saw the people as they came
and went and waited. You also saw their stuff piled on the dock until they loaded
it onto their wagon and rolled it home. You knew what kind of toilet paper they
bought. Alice still rated two-ply a luxury more subtle and telling than a person's
bag or shoes. You knew that the people with the Fairway bags and the paper products
were getting off here in Waterby or in Saltaire. The people getting off in the
town of Kismet always had beer.
Cars were conveyors of privacy. Without
them, you lived a lot more of your life out in the open. Where you went, who you
went with. Who you waited for at the ferry dock. Who you brushed your hair for.
You were exposed here, but you were also safe.
The carlessness of the
place had always appealed to certain utopian types, even shallow ones. "Get rid
of cars and you get rid of global warming, oil wars in the Middle East, obesity,
and most crime, too," her father liked to say.
The ferry put an extra
emphasis on coming and going. Adults went back and forth all the time, but there
had been many summers when Alice and Riley had come and gone only once. They came
with their pale skin, haircuts meant to last the summer, their tender feet, and
their shyness. They left with brown, freckled, bitten skin; tangly hair; foot
bottoms thick like tires; and familiarity verging on rudeness.
She remembered
the hellos, and she remembered the good-byes even more. End-of-summer tradition
dictated that whoever was last to leave the island saluted departing friends by
jumping into the water as the good-bye ferry pulled away.
Now she heard
the boat grinding up behind her. She loosened her arms and pressed her hands against
the wood. She heard the slapping of the wake against the pilings as the boat came
around. She untucked one leg and bounced her free heel on the plank in front of
her.
Alice would have liked to do the arriving instead of the waiting.
She would have rather done the leaving than the getting left, but that was never
the way it happened. For some reason it was always Alice who waited and Alice
who dove in.
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