Reviews of The Summer of Firsts and Lasts

Sisters Calla, Violet, and Daisy are overjoyed to be back at their beloved Camp Callanwolde for another summer together. Calla, who is starting college in the fall, has loved best friend Duncan for years and is hoping this will be the summer they finally get together. Readers will relate as Calla creates meaning in every comment and look from her crush, while understanding her sisters’ frustration at her passivity. Violet embarks on a forbidden relationship with James, a camp counselor, but is also drawn to bad girl Brynn, which leads to problems for all three sisters. Daisy’s summer is off to a strong start when cute Joel seeks her out, but after a make-out session gone bad, it takes a nosedive. Watching Daisy learn to stand up for herself in the face of bullying is perhaps the most moving part of this well-told story that celebrates the powerful love between sisters. Although the siblings’ voices are essentially the same, McVoy (After the Kiss) switches between their perspectives frequently, keeping the story moving, and her writing brings the summer camp setting to life. Ages 14–up.

Publishers Weekly, March 21, 2011

I’m a camp girl. I went to camp for eight years as a camper and four or five more years as a counselor or staff member. I LOVE camp. And I know what goes on there. So — first thought — a book about camp? YES! YES!

My second thought when starting a book about camp (which I’ve only done a few times before), is that I hope the author gets the mood of camp right. It’s an immediate Do Not Finish for me if the author doesn’t write about camp in the right way (yes, I’m picky — but I also feel knowledgeable enough about the topic to be this way).

So I will start this review by saying Terra Elan McVoy made me MISS CAMP TERRIBLY. Which means she did it right.

There is a camp feeling that is hard to explain, but McVoy did the best of all the camp books I’ve read previously. Her characters noted that camp friends are immediate and fast, that the few weeks you are there are what you live your whole summer for, that you rarely talk to camp friends besides at camp. She got the cabin dynamics, the group sessions, the campfires all right.

On top of that, the three sisters that narrate the book (in turns) each have distinct personalities and each behave according to those personalities — meaning they don’t do things for the sake of a good story in the book. By the time I got to know the sisters, not only was I really missing camp — I really wanted to be part of their sister clan.

The title suggests some trials and tribulations, and that certainly happens while the sisters experience their summer at camp. It’s fun to not know which events will be ‘firsts’ and which will be ‘lasts’ — I wasn’t really ever able to predict an outcome before it happened.

A book about camp and sisterhood, The Summer of Firsts and Lasts will get you in the camp spirit whether you’ve been to camp before or not. You’ll be wishing you were roasting marshmallows right next to Violet, Calla, and Daisy, and wanting to hold their hands when things go badly. A great summer read!

Chick Loves Lit, April 2011

It’s likely that three sisters never looked forward to a summer at camp more than Calla, finally a staffer at the camp she loves; Violet, relishing her last year as a camper; and Daisy, eager to prove that she doesn’t need her older sisters to succeed. But the higher the expectations, the harder the potential fall as the sisters face challenges from negotiating an adult job to a first sexual experience to isolation and bullying. This is a poignant portrayal of sisterhood, summer love, responsibility, betrayal, and forgiveness that fully captures the intensity and emotion of the fleeting days at summer camp.

Heather Booth, Booklist, April 2011

For sisters Calla, Violet, and Daisy, summer camp is something special. It's the place their parents met and, for Calla at least, the three weeks away from home during the summer have always been something to look forward to. This year Calla's working as an assistant to the camp director while Violet has her last summer as a camper and Daisy tries to figure out who she is apart from her older sisters. Added to the girls' summer-camp-related stories are their romantic lives: Calla hopes to finally admit her feelings to her best friend, sure that he feels the same way, while Violet's attraction to a boy she knew two summers ago is undeniable and Daisy's first-day-of-camp crush turns out worse than she expects.

This is a difficult story to sum up, which is probably why the jacket-flap summary feels so misleading (and, to be honest, what I wrote above isn't too much better): this book isn't really about boys. It's about three sisters and how their last summer all together at camp defines and changes them. Told from the POVs of each girl, the story develops their personalities and the dynamics between them well, if a bit strangely. The fact is that while this is very much a book about the bonds of sisterhood, for a large part of the book Calla, Violet, and Daisy don't have many scenes together. Calla's busy behind the scenes of camp, helping the new director keep everything running smoothly; it's a job she's proud to have gotten but it's obvious that for Calla, who loves camp more than any of them, not getting to truly experience it this summer is a letdown. Violet, tired of always playing by the rules, falls under the spell of a rebellious fellow camper, Brynn. And Daisy, the youngest, deals with being something of an outcast in her cabin, thanks to her more introspective personality and the fact that she's not willing to bend to others' expectations of her.

In a big way, I loved this book. At different times during the course of the story I related strongly to each of the sisters: though the timespan of The Summer of Firsts and Lasts is only two weeks, there's so much detail and so much happening both internally and externally, that it feels like much longer. There's love, friendship, heartbreak, nonconformity, and unity all conveyed here. The emotions and relationships are rarely straight-forward, even and especially between the sisters themselves. While it's obvious that they love each other and would do anything for one another, there's the usual push-and-pull of family and of sisters that McVoy writes incredibly well.

Outside of the sister's relationships with each other, there's the romantic aspect of the book, which was a bit hit-and-miss for me. Calla's friendship with Duncan, the boy she's in love with, seems predictable from the outset: she's sure that he shares her feelings and that this will finally be their summer while her sisters, who've seen this play out again and again between the two of them, think she's being a little pathetic and wish she would just confess her feelings and get it over with. I wanted more out of this relationship, more that showed just how close Calla and Duncan were and why their relationship was so confusing. And there are glimpses of this, but because they rarely see each other, it was never as much as I wanted.

Meanwhile, Violet's unstoppable crush on James, a boy she knew from two summers ago, is a very different sort of relationship and since it's the most romantic/couple-y one in the book, I wish it had been handled a bit differently. For the most part, Violet and James don't talk. They share glances, they're constantly aware of each other, and they sneak off together in the night. But the majority of scenes we get between them are purely physical and, considering how attached Violet is to him, how happy he makes her, and how authentic these feelings come across, I wish there had been more. More of his personality and more of their dynamic together. Because while I really wanted to root for them, it's hard to root for a couple you really know next to nothing about.

And this, unfortunately, gets at one of my biggest problems with The Summer of Firsts and Lasts: it's often hard to really pin down these character's personalities. Part of this, I think, is because they're in the world of summer camp, which doesn't quite operate the way other settings/places do. Though the emotions come across so incredibly clear, it's sometimes difficult not having something solid, concrete, to hang those emotions on. Terra Elan McVoy is a uniquely talented writer and I love this book — it's a bittersweet story with complex, realistic emotions — but still I sometimes felt like there was a little bit of something missing.

Jordyn, Ten Cent Notes, March 1, 2012