About the Author
Daisy Alpert Florin attended Dartmouth College and received graduate degrees from Columbia University and Bank Street Graduate School of Education. She is a recipient of the 2016 Kathryn Gurfein Writing Fellowship at Sarah Lawrence College and was a 2019–20 fellow in the BookEnds novel revision fellowship, where she worked with founding director Susan Scarf Merrell. A native New Yorker, Florin lives in Connecticut with her family. My Last Innocent Year is her first novel.
Product Description
An incisive, deeply resonant debut novel about a nonconsensual sexual encounter that propels one woman’s final semester at an elite New England college into controversy and chaos―and into an ill-advised affair with a married professor.
It’s 1998 and Isabel Rosen, the only daughter of a Lower East Side appetizing store owner, has one semester left at Wilder College, a prestigious school in New Hampshire. Desperate to shed her working-class roots and still mourning the death of her mother four years earlier, Isabel has always felt like an outsider at Wilder but now, in her final semester, she believes she has found her place―until a nonconsensual sexual encounter with one of the only other Jewish students on campus leaves her reeling.
Enter R. H. Connelly, a once-famous poet and Isabel’s writing professor, a man with secrets of his own. Connelly makes Isabel feel seen, beautiful, talented: the woman she longs to become. His belief in her ignites a belief in herself, and the two begin an affair that shakes the foundation of who Isabel thinks she is, for better and worse. As the lives of the adults around her slowly come apart, Isabel discovers that the line between youth and adulthood is less defined than she thought.
A coming-of-age story set against the backdrop of the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal, Daisy Alpert Florin's My Last Innocent Year is a timely and wise portrait of a young woman learning to trust her voice and move toward independence while recognizing the beauty and grit of where she came from.
Review
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
A March Indie Next Pick
A USA Today Must-Read Book
Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2023 by Zibby Owens and LitHub
Named a Most Anticipated Debut Book of 2023 by Debutiful
Named a Must-Read Book of Winter by Entertainment Weekly and Town & Country
“Lands like a refreshing, deep breath... My Last Innocent Year is a heartfelt chronicle of a writer who realizes that her stories about girls with feelings matter every bit as much as the ones written by the guy who annotates The New Yorker.”
―Elisabeh Egan, The New York Times Book Review
“This evocative, eloquent campus confidential lays out the complications of the Clinton-Lewinsky era just as you might remember them.”
―People Magazine
“There have always been impressionable young people who fall for older men ― teachers and other mentors ― and there have always been older men who have taken advantage of these crushes. But rarely has their story been told as thoughtfully as in Daisy Alpert Florin's intelligent and sensuous debut novel, My Last Innocent Year, a remarkable coming-of-age story that examines sexual politics, power and lust and the sometimes murky nature of romantic encounters.”
―Minneapolis Star Tribune
“A deftly written campus coming-of-age debut narrative, My Last Innocent Year is one of those stories that stays with you.”
―Zibby Owens, GMA
“A college senior reckons with the aftermath of what might have been sexual assault by a fellow student ― and tumbles into a love affair with her married professor ― against the backdrop of Clinton-Lewinsky-era America in Florin's resonant, coolly composed debut.”
―Entertainment Weekly
“A deeply timely and relevant campus novel.”
―Town & Country
“A poignant tale that doesn’t shy from sharp edges, a universal story both timeless and timely. . . An intimate, insightful novel.”
―New York Journal of Books
“By the end of Florin’s masterful bildungsroman, our narrator is
