Written by Sarah Van Name
Review written by Diana Iozzia
"The Goodbye Summer" is a fun young adult romance that takes on many different aspects but fails to fully address its most important topics. As this book's demographic is female teenagers, we should consider how female teenagers could read this.
Our main character is Caroline, who is spending her time working at a local aquarium's gift shop, trying to save money for the fall. She's in a relationship with boring and slightly abusive Jake, who plans to convince her to drop of out high school and work on his father's farm in a different state. I did not like him from the start, but his personality gets worse throughout the book. Caroline befriends a group of counselors who work at the aquarium's summer camp. She becomes closest with Georgia, who is from a wealthy family but feels neglected by them.
Georgia and Caroline strike up one of those unbelievable teen friendships, and it's lovely. In the back of my mind the whole time reading, I just kept thinking, "wouldn't it be nice if they turned out to be gay or bisexual?" I felt this book would have been a really nice entry for young girls wanting to read about LGBT, but I was disappointed. Now, there was not any inclination that this book would turn out that way, but I felt the characters had a really cute friendship and hoped they would date.
The other characters are stationary but fun to read about nonetheless. This is a great summer read, but I'm glad that it touches on neglect, manipulation, and more importantly consent. There is a very uncomfortable scene in which Caroline does not want to have sex with Jake in any circumstance. She does not say no, so he continues. She does not say yes. She does not say that he raped her. However, I think this should have been a more important note to touch upon, rather than brush it off as 'bad sex' as Caroline referenced.
In conclusion, I did enjoy the book, but I beg those who read it to realize that the serious topics addressed should have been explained better, rather than the thousandth reference of the girls eating gooey pizza.
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