a camp romance, 20 years later

Clara Millen is close to making vice president at work. She’s right on the verge, and if she helps them nail the marketing campaign for Boston’s hip female-owned brewery Alewife. And when the company president calls Clara out during a very happy Friday happy hour, she thinks it’s her moment. Instead, the president announces that she’s starting a program to help prevent burnout, offering weeklong mini-sabbaticals to those who need one. And she’s starting with Clara, who she things is in need of that week off.

Clara is humiliated, and when she learns that her ex-boyfriend just got engaged to someone else, in the very park where he had broken up with Clara a year ago, she is not happy. And she just has a couple of weeks to finish the pitch for Alewife, now with a week gone while she’s on a forced vacation. But the good news is that just happens to coincide with the week that she had wanted to take off, to meet up with all her old friends from summer camp.

It was twenty years ago that they had all been together at Pine Lake Camp in northern New Hampshire. Clara had her first kiss with Mack, who she’d had a crush on all summer. She had the best time, making friends and swimming in the lake, crafting friendship bracelets and playing truth or dare. And then she tied Mack at the camp relay. Before they al left to go back to their homes, they had written letters to their 35-year-old selves. Sam had collected them all, to send out to everyone in 20 years.

And then the summer was over, and Clara headed back home. That was when she’d found out her parents had split up over the summer, her dad already moving out. Just like that, nothing about her life was the same. That hopeful, fun Clara from camp was gone, and this new Clara had to work really hard to find her balance again.

As she packed for her mini-sabbatical, Clara looked through the mail that had piled up on the table, and that’s where she found it. Sam had mailed out the letters after 20 years, and her letter from 15-year-old Clara was right there. She read the letter to see what she had written to her older self. Do something that scares you every day. Jump off the high dive. Cut your hair. Be there for your friends. 35-year-old Clara wants to be that person again. She promises to herself that she will try to be fearless

But she gets to camp and realizes being fearless is harder than she thought. It will take some work to get back to that confident teenager she’d been. And it might take some good old camp activities to get her in the right mindset. And it may even take kissing Mack again, just for good measure. And when camp Clara is reawakened, and she is feeling confident and connected again, will she be able to step back into her life in Boston and get back to work? Or will she find that she is craving a totally different life?

One Last Summer is the story of a group of kids who were great friends at camp as teenagers and who have grown up and made lives as adults. It’s about remembering what it’s like to be a kid and reconnect with that part of yourself that believes in love, that wants to take on the world, before the debt and the burnout and the heartbreak. That person who just believes in the possibilities. It’s about falling in love with yourself again, and with life, and with nature. And it’s about kissing that first boy who stole your heart.

There is a movie from the 1990s called Indian Summer, and it’s about a group of adults who had all gone to camp together, and how they come back to visit the camp for one last week before the man running the camp, Unca Lou (played to perfection by Alan Arkin) retires for good. When I read what this book was about, I was wanting to catch that same feeling as I get when I watch Indian Summer. It’s not exactly the same, as that focused on a group of characters, and this novel focuses more on Clara and her relationship with Mack, but I did get that same sense of wanting to revisit a beloved part of childhood and bring some of that magic back to the present.

One Last Summer has a lovely blend of present and past, of recovering a part of yourself you’ve lost, and of learning to be more present in the present. It’s a sweet romance, and the camp theme can bring back lots of good memories, even if the closest you got to a summer camp yourself was watching The Parent Trap (the Lindsay Lohan version).

Egalleys for One Last Summer were provided by Forever through NetGalley, with many thanks.