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Summary: Great Book..
Review: I just finished Seventeenth Summer yesterday....It was a great book that let you experience love from a young woman's eyes. I recommend this book to everyone because it is easy to read and captivating. In fact, it was soo captivating i read the whole book in one day!
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Summary: Timeless and Enchanting
Review: Seventeenth Summer is a timeless coming of age story that can be enjoyed and appreciated by all that have ever been in love. The story is truely enchanting and easy to relate to. Angie's experiences are able to catch your attention and cause the reader to remember their own experiences in a lighthearted way.
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Summary: Summer Flop
Review: I commend this book for its moral sense and recommend it in the study of dating practices during the 40s, but this is one of the most boring books I have ever read. I don't understand how it could hold anyone's attention, especially with our face-paced society the way it is. Interesting historically, but I did not enjoy it.
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Summary: beautiful book
Review: seventeenth summer is truly a beautiful book about how life changes, especially for the main character in the book. i highly reccomend it for others to read, its not only insighful, but also touching. I just feel sad that it had to end the way that it did.
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Summary: A book to be passed on for generations
Review: My mother read this book when it was first published and she was a teen, from the area detailed in this story. I read this book when I was a teen in the early '80s (with the original watercolor picture, not the one of the too-modern embracing couple-- Jack and Angie wouldn't behave like that!!!) While the setting is obviously from just before WWII and things are not the same today, the plot is essentially timeless. A girl who is basically sheltered goes out on her first date with a boy and learns a few things about the outside world. She meets a lot of new people. She finds she has decisions to make about things such as drinking, what one does on a date, and coping with parental reactions to her dating. Some things never do change.
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Summary: First, it's not from 1986...
Review: I first read Seventeenth Summer when I was in my teens -- in the 1970s -- and I adored it. It's so nice to know that it's back in print. Speaking as the middle-aged woman I am now, I think it's rather sad that young people today would find this story boring. It's from a more innocent time, but the emotions are still the same. Frankly, while times have changed, not all the changes are for the better. I am far from being a prude, but I'd rather read stories like this than some of the more explicit fare one sees nowadays.
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Summary: Sweet, old time love story
Review: I really enjoyed this novel but it is important to remember that the story is set in the 1930's-40's. I didn't realize this in the begining but when you do it all falls into place. The love story starts off immediatly with a gorgeus sailboat scene that would make a girl love to be in Angeline's position. Its a good read but not if your looking for help in your own teenage love...(Fast girls were the ones who kissed on a second date...imagine what they would think of us now!)
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Summary: Boring.
Review: The story was nice though it almost put me to sleep. The pace was slow making it boring. I didn't learn any new insights from the book. This was a total disappointment. I don't understand why many people liked this book.
Rating:
Summary: Sweet, but not lowdown
Review: "Seventeenth Summer" by Maureen Daly is a novel about a shy girl named Angie who has never dated. Right after she graduates from high school, a popular boy named Jack asks her out, and they see each other all summer until she has to leave for college.I'm very fond of this book -- I've read it every summer since my teens, and most winters, too -- though it has some elements that are off-putting. On the downside, Angie is difficult for me to like, or even to empathize with. Not to put too fine a point on it, she's my worst nightmare of an uptight Midwestern stiff -- to the extent that she has any personality at all. "Marjorie Morningstar", also about a 17-year-old girl coming into womanhood during the 1930s, was much more accessible because Marjorie, while distinctly a product of her era, is nonetheless intelligent, articulate, and assertive. Angie, in contrast, is meek, passive, immature -- and often, downright boring. She's sweet and well-meaning, but undeniably a bit of a dullard. When Angie's not with Jack, she's barely even alive. She doesn't go anywhere, do anything, or have contact with anyone outside her immediate family. The only character in fiction that has less of a life than Angie is "Carrie", and at least Carrie had uncanny powers. Most of the other characters are similarly vapid. As pleasant and peaceful as it is to read about a 1930s summer in small-town Wisconsin; the characters, with very few exceptions (Swede, Dollie; Angie's mother, who appears to be a closet alcoholic), are rigid and provincial. They're so bland they border on being creepy -- it's like reading about polite, featureless androids. Parts of the book are also sadly dated by contemporary standards, which makes it difficult to relate to. The book is set in the 1930s, but not John Steinbeck's 1930s -- nor even Dorothy Parker's. Sex, race, politics, the war brewing in Europe, and the Depression -- simply don't exist. Angie and Jack's relationship is so naïve and prudish that if the book came out today, they'd have to call it "Twelfth Summer". Everybody is obedient and authority-identified and so overly repressed as to seem one broken shoelace away from climbing a tower with a telescopic rifle. In the scene where Jack joins Angie's family for Sunday dinner, Jack accidentally clicks his spoon against his teeth, causing Angie to fly into a rage: "Nobody has to put up with that!". Seething with anger, she speculates that Jack's (working class) father probably sits down to the dinner table in his shirtsleeves. I was actually baffled -- not only because the provocation seemed near-nonexistent; but also, shirtsleeves as opposed to what? Surely not a jacket and tie? Did anybody actually wear that to eat dinner at home -- during the hottest part of summer, yet? Were people really that formal in those days? Or does Angie just need to vent somehow, somewhere, because her life is a pressure cooker? That said, I nevertheless find this book irresistible in many ways. Daly has achieved near-perfect success at a near-impossible task -- capturing on paper what new love feels like. She seems to remember everything, down to the smallest detail, and her sensitivity and precision in describing Angie's thoughts and feelings evokes in the reader her own long-forgotten (or maybe not?) experiences and emotions. Whenever I re-read those passages -- e.g., Angie the morning after her first date, not wanting to wake all the way up because she doesn't want "last night" to turn into "this morning" -- I find myself thinking, "Yes, that's just how it is". The other observations, which are plentiful, are the sort which often seem mundane when encountered in everyday living; but are rich, glowing, and almost gem-like in recollection. The physicality which Daly couldn't write into the romance circa 1938 gets sublimated into these observations, so that the book is permeated with a lush, almost tangible, polymorphous sensuality that drenches every page. Descriptions of the smallest and most ordinary things -- the smell of Ivory soap, tomatoes growing in the backyard, an ironed cotton dress, the sparkle of lake water in early-morning sunshine -- stand out vividly, yet are woven seamlessly together. The resulting tapestry is a poignant daydream of a perfect summer in a long-vanished America. There's also a minor but compelling subplot, which supplies a much-needed dark side to a book threatening an overdose of sweetness and light. Angie's sister Lorraine (a twentyish coed with negative self-esteem) goes on a blind date, which gradually turns into a dysfunctional relationship, with a salesman named Martin. The relationship, shown only in brief glimpses from Angie's perspective, is nonetheless chilling as it spirals downward. The reader watches from the sidelines in helpless horror as Martin is increasingly revealed as toxic -- hostile, selfish, arrogant, dishonest, cold, rude, exploitative -- and Lorraine does everything NOT to do with this type of man, frustrating us with equal parts pity and exasperation as she tries ever harder, yet makes matters ever worse. The scene where Lorraine and Martin join Angie and Jack in the piano bar is gut-wrenching in its tension. In stark contrast to Angie and Jack's lighthearted, affectionate relationship; Martin insults, mistreats, and publicly humiliates Lorraine as everyone else squirms uncomfortably; then tops it off by cruising two prostitutes while walking Lorraine to the door. It's a disturbing, truly hellish vignette of an abusive relationship. If you want an action-packed adventure with two-fisted characters, look elsewhere. "Seventeenth Summer" is sentimental pastel nostalgia, as sweet and fragile as meadow flowers. The dated elements are awkward; the prose is, if not purple, then certainly lavender; and the story occasionally verges on romance-novel territory -- but the yearning emotion and meticulous detail lift the book above the level of soap opera and give it a gentle, soft-focus quality of that's as sensuous and reassuring as comfort food.
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Summary: To read. . .and to pass on to your daughter. . .
Review: I discovered this book after reading an excerpt in one of those teenager-in-love anthologies that Scholastic books used to market in their catalogs. Like many others here, I re-read this one every summer, and have for close to three decades (yikes!) Angie and Jack were easy to relate to--she's a college-bound girl from a middle-class background, he was the star basketball player whose family owns the town bakery. Angie been something of an outsider in town, having attended a private girls-only prep school. Jack discovers her almost by accident one day when he blows the paper from his straw out of his booth at the drugstore, and looks over to see where it landed. From there, it's just a matter of time until they're a couple. There is nothing cliched about this book, even though it has many of the common elements we associate with teenagers in love. It's rounded out by scenes of Angie's family life and her plans for college even though she's falling deeper in love with Jack and he with her. One caution: this book gets reprinted and re-released periodically with newer contemporary covers. You need to be aware that it is definitely not set in contemporary times, though. There are many references to society and mores of its setting--Wisconsin in the 30s--but the feel and experience of first love transcends everything. I think this one's a classic and a keeper. This is the only fiction book besides Gone with the Wind that I've kept from my own adolesence. Someday it will be my daughter's. On June 21, 2012, when she turns 17, this will be my gift to her.
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