My Last Innocent Year

“A deeply timely and relevant campus novel.”

—Town & Country

 

“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.”

—Booklist

 

“A brilliantly crafted campus novel for the generation before #MeToo...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...Florin’s debut is not to be missed.”

—Kirkus

 

“Immersive...Florin does great work exploring the era's murky sexual politics.”

—Publishers Weekly

 

“My Last Innocent Year possesses an urgent timeliness—in its examination of gender, power, and class on a college campus—but Daisy Alpert Florin’s remarkable debut is, at heart, an intimate, intricately constructed coming of age tale to rival the greats of the genre, from The Great Gatsby to Catcher in the Rye. Remarkable, unputdownable, brilliant.”

—Joanna Rakoff, author of My Salinger Year

 

"Gripping, nuanced, and thought-provoking, My Last Innocent Year is an intimate portrait of a woman on the cusp of adulthood grappling with the thorniest of issues: agency and consent, ambition and jealousy, loyalty and betrayal. This beautifully written novel reverberated in my bones.”

—Christina Baker Kline, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Orphan Train

 

“Propulsive, evocative, and very hot. Every page of My Last Innocent Year bursts with insight about a young woman, shaped by time and circumstance, who is learning to tell the truth.”

—Julia May Jonas, author of Vladimir

 

“Florin is a magician. The salaciousness, the melodrama, and moral outrage one expects in a campus novel about a teacher/student romance are stunningly absent, and in their place Florin offers you nothing but her intoxicating clear sightedness, the kind of simplicity and weight and wisdom you very rarely see in a debut novel. Her characters feel so real it is almost indecent. Monica Lewinsky, but painted by Vermeer. The recognizable stereotypes of youth and lust so honestly accounted, it is like being offered your own youth captured in glass, not as you remember it, but as it was. Astonishing.”

—Rufi Thorpe, author of The Knockout Queen

 

“My Last Innocent Year is one of the best novels about life on a college campus I've ever read, and Isabel Rosen is a distinctive, necessary addition to the Jewish canon; Daisy Florin excavates her characters' journey through the end of innocence with great honesty, insight, and a singular voice.”

—Karen E. Bender, author of the National Book Award Finalist Refund

 

“My Last Innocent Year is a tightrope walk of a debut novel about womanhood, power, and privilege. Quietly propulsive, this is a book that asks us to reexamine the relationship between coercion and consent, a subtly crafted character study of an artist in the making—I could not put it down.”

—Ellie Eaton, author of The Divines

 

“An incisive, honest, and compulsively readable coming-of-age story, My Last Innocent Year offers a refreshingly nuanced perspective on contemporary conversations about consent, the power dynamics of sexual relationships and friendships, and the challenges women encounter in claiming their place as artists.”

—Karen Dukess, author of The Last Book Party

 

“My Last Innocent Year hits a sweet spot: great storytelling, wonderful characters, and a genuinely complex set of ethical dilemmas that cannot be reduced to simple right and wrong.”

—Susan Scarf Merrell, author of Shirley

 

“I tore through this sparkling and gritty coming-of-age novel, nodding the whole time. Yes, desire is messy. Sexuality can blur into violence. All the difficult, gray truths don't resolve into black-and-white clarity just because we wish they would. Yes, yes, yes. Daisy Florin is an astonishing writer and My Last Innocent Year is a remarkable book.”

—Catherine Newman, author of We All Want Impossible Things

 

“Daisy Florin’s debut is a beautifully written, assured exploration of a young woman’s conflicting desires for love and sex, for success and recognition, for belonging and independence, and the destabilizing, heady affair that will shape her life for decades to come. Florin has managed to give us a story that is fresh, vital, and surprising, while at the same time will have readers nodding in recognition as Isabel Rosen navigates ambition, lust, grief, and what it means to find your voice in a world that doesn’t feel like it belongs to you.”

—Caitlin Mullen, author of Please See Us