Shawna Finnigan's Reviews > My Last Innocent Year: A Novel

TW// cheating, mentions of anti-Semitism, rape, mentions of sexual assault, grooming, mention of dog death, mention of murder, divorce, domestic abuse, phyiscal abuse, mentions of cancer, mentions of eating disorders, sexism, death (including of mothers, fathers, children), mention of alcoholism, depression, mention of dementia, discussions of suicide, mention of self-harm (including insensitive comments about it), mentions of miscarriage, mention of heart attack

I didn’t include the triggers in a spoiler warning like I normally do because this book is extremely triggering for a lot of people, so everyone should be aware of the trigger warnings before starting the book.

It’s hard to write a review of this book because I don’t even know where to start with my thoughts. On the one hand, My Last Innocent Year did some phenomenal things. On the other hand, it severely lacked in some elements.

My Last Innocent Year reads like a memoir. It’s really fast paced and bounces around through Isabel’s memories a lot. I adored Daisy Alpert Florin’s writing style and I can see myself reading more of her works in the future.

This book is easily one that I could see being studied in English classes in the future. There’s a lot of hard hitting topics and symbolism in this book that would be interesting to study as a group.

I’m a victim of grooming, so I knew this book would be hard to read at times, but I appreciated the way that the grooming was portrayed in this book. It shows the way that grooming sneaks up on people and isn’t as obvious as most people think it is. Grooming isn’t as outright obvious as a lot of people think, so the grooming representation in this book is vital in helping young people recognize the signs.

The rape in the story was also written well in terms of how subtle it is. Like grooming, people think rape is extremely visible and easy to notice. But as Isabel’s story shows, it isn’t always easy for the victims to recognize and understand what happened to them.

Now onto the big issue I had with this book.

This book didn’t dive deep enough into how grooming effects the victims. The last two chapters should’ve focused solely on how Isabel was recovering from the events of the story, but instead it tried to rush through several years of Isabel’s life. The grooming portrayal feels incomplete without looking at how it impacts the victim’s entire life. At the end of the story, I’m not even sure if Isabel can identify what happened to her as completely wrong. I get the impression that she didn’t even try to work through what happened to her, which made the story leave off on a bleak note. While it’s true that not everyone can fully process and heal from these types of events, shouldn’t victims at least be given hope that there’s a better future? This book lacked that hope.

It’s also worth noting that this book keeps being pitched with the phrase “nonconsensual sexual encounter” and I think that’s a disservice to what happened to Isabel. It’s rape - no amount of fancy lingo will make it any different. Truthfully someone in marketing should’ve changed the wording because we don’t need fancy wording -- we need the truth.

Three stars pretty accurately summarizes how I feel about this book. It did a lot of great things, but it could’ve been a lot better. I think this book would be good for people wanting to learn about what grooming looks like and how subtle it can be. However, it needs additional material to go along with it so that people can see the impacts that the types of relationships in this book have on people.

Thank you so much to the publisher for sending me a copy of this book through a Goodreads giveaway.