Seventeenth Summer by Maureen Daly is widely acknowledged to be the first YA, young adult,
novel. It was published in 1942 and Daly very likely did write it at age
seventeen.
I found Daly’s book to be a
great time capsule of certain aspects of the Midwestern lifestyle that my
mother would have experienced. My mother’s family lived closer to the earth than
the families depicted in the novel. My grandfather had six kids to feed on a
laborer’s salary.
What rang true were Daly’s
descriptions of gardens, trees, birds, and even the insects. She made the water
in the lake and rain that fell on the roof come alive in such vivid reality
that I had to marvel at the skill for such a young author.
Elm trees have been gone for
so long that I’d forgotten about their lacy foliage. Likewise, walking across
the grass and stirring up clouds of powdery-winged moths. I had to go outdoors
in the early morning darkness to see if insects still swarmed around the street
lights—they didn’t. It made me feel that my little section of suburbia was
something of a desert for life forms other than humans.
However, I can’t say I liked
how Daly treated her teens. They were so bound up with artificially formal
rules of how to fit into that society there was no room for the different or
adventurous young woman. They would be punished by being ostracized and shunned.
The guys didn’t fair much better. They were two-dimensional and hardly real as
they were slotted into their assigned roles.
This book was published after
the attack on Pearl Harbor and I couldn’t help
feeling the dread of knowing all this wide-eyed innocence would soon come to an
end in the worse possible way.
Yes, Seventeenth
Summer was a window on an ideal, too perfect past. But it’s not a bad thing
to be reminded of where we might have been … once. It can show us how much
we’ve lost.
