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Young and In Love: Seventeenth Summer

Seventeenth Summer Buy this book

It's summertime, and the stars shining in the nighttime sky are bright with promise. It's summertime, and the days are long and lazy, but not nearly long enough. It's summertime, and the warm breezes are as soft as a first kiss from a special someone. It's summertime, and Angie Morrow and Jack Duluth are falling in love.

Seventeen-year-old Angie has just graduated from an all-girls' high school in Wisconsin, and she expects her summer to pass quietly, the days filled with preparations for college in the fall, routine household chores, and a lot of reading. But then she meets Jack, and summer becomes something magical.


Angie's first real boyfriend is eighteen, also a new high school graduate, driving a truck for his father's bakery over the summer. As she starts to see him on a regular basis, Angie not only experiences the tentative joys of a first love, but also discovers the social milieu that comes with being part of a couple.

The times were different when Maureen Daly wrote her story: Angie is rather embarrassed to admit to having kissed Jack after only their third date; "fast" girls are girls who neck in parked cars (Angie's not even quite sure what necking is); and boys seem to behave like gentlemen, even when giggly fifteen girls drink too much beer. Girls must invent subterfuges (did I leave my gold compact in your car?) to call boys; boys gather outside McKnight's drugstore, scoping out promising sophomore girls and checking that kids who are supposed to be "going steady" don't show up with the wrong person. Girls slather cold cream on their faces and roll up their hair in metal curlers, and are miserable if they don't have a date for the country club dance.

The world of teenage rituals that is the backdrop of the story is rigid and clearly defined, one where violating the rules can turn an unwary misfit into a social outcast. Wear oxfords on your feet instead of saddle shoes or moccasins, let the high school crowd see you at Pete's with a cousin, and you might as well be invisible--or dead. Both beer and smoking are accepted elements of the teen culture (Jack even smokes a pipe sometimes), though Angie thinks that a girl can't feel ladylike if she's got a bottle of beer in front of her.

Angie can't select a "formal" or go out on a date without parental permission (and the parents' word is law), but she can stay home all summer before college without even thinking of going to work--though her older sister Lorraine, home from school, does have a summer job. Lorraine's sad summer interlude with an unworthy young man forms a contrast to Angie and Jack's more hopeful story; after all, once lonely Lorraine makes the mistake of accepting a last-minute date with him, how can he possibly respect her?

In describing Angie and Jack's romance, Daly evokes the awkward feelings and missteps of a budding relationship, the breathless wonder tinged with uncertainty, the worry of exposing the boyfriend to the family. She also evokes the sights and sounds and smells of summer: buttered popcorn at the county fair, Fourth of July sparklers, fluttering moths. The days are lovely, but fall, and the end of the summer romance, are inevitable.

Seventeenth Summer is a lovely, emotionally honest homage to a special, fleeting time.