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The Last Summer of You and Me
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The Last Summer of You and Me (2007) (edit title/settings)

by Ann Brashares (Author) (edit contributors)

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Description edit see section history

The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants author delivers her first novel for adults, a treacly tale about the tribulations a trio of longtime friends encounter. For as long as she can remember, 21-year-old Alice has spent summers on Fire Island with her parents and older sister, Riley. Riley,... read more

Summary edit see section history

The story is set on Fire Island, and also partly in nearby New York City. Alice and Riley are two sisters. Nearly every summer of their lives they have shared the same childhood friend, Paul, whose widowed mother owns a Fire Island beach mansion next door to the smaller beach house of the... read more (warning: may contain spoilers)

The story is set on Fire Island, and also partly in nearby New York City. Alice and Riley are two sisters. Nearly every summer of their lives they have shared the same childhood friend, Paul, whose widowed mother owns a Fire Island beach mansion next door to the smaller beach house of the girls and their parents. Alice is the graceful, elegant sister thinking of applying to Law school at NYU. Riley is the athletic sister who has life-guarded on the island since she was fifteen. The three of them have many shared memories of carefree swimming and playing on the island. Paul has been absent for two summers, having been studying and volunteering in California. This is the last summer all three could manage to be together. During the summer, Alice and Paul start to have feelings outside of friendship for each other. They both realize they have always loved one another, but now in a different way. Alice even goes as far to give Paul her virginity one night on the beach. One night when Alice has sneaked over to Paul's house to make love, the emergency alarm goes off during the middle of the night. (Paul lives alone in the mansion, his widowed mother seldom there). Alice dismisses the alarm as an old geezer needing attention. But it is not so; the person needing helicoptered out is her own sister, Riley. It seems Riley is suffering from rheumatic heart disease. Alice is overwhelmed with guilt and a rush of feelings. Alice suddenly leaves the island without explanation to be with her hospitalized sister and parents, leaving Paul puzzled and hurt. (Riley insisted that her medical condition be kept secret from Paul). The summer over, Alice postpones graduate school to work as a groundskeeper and store cashier near the family's Manhattan home, while Riley awaits a donor heart transplant. Alice buys Riley an indoor pool membership, which Riley enjoys, trying to carry on normally and ignore her medical condition. Meanwhile Paul, studying philosophy at NYU, is constantly thinking about Alice and his feelings towards her. He's mad at her, then he's in love with her. He even attends an old island acquaintance's wedding to see her; she also sees him once in Central Park with another girl. Riley finally tells Paul of her medical problems. Meanwhile, Paul's mother gives him the beach mansion, and he clears it out and sells it for $3 million, which he donates to Bellevue Hospital, where his wealthy but wild-living father had died long ago. One night back in the city, Alice returns from work to find Riley has passed. The funeral is held and Alice and her parents go to Fire Island to spread her ashes. Alice volunteers to tend to the beach house; the family has decided to sell it. Paul visits. His house is sold to a new family whose children Alice babysits each morning. The story ends with Alice and Paul making love again and leaving the Island for the first time together; she has decided to apply to NYU school of social work and be near Paul, a philosophy student there.

Characters/People edit see section history

  • Alice: Main character. 21 years old
  • Riley: Alice's older sister. Best friends with Paul. Is 23 years old. Loves to swim. She loves adventure, and always wants to be doing something.
  • Paul: Friend of Alice and Riley. Is 23 years old.
  • Ethan: He is Alice's and Riley's Father.
  • Judy: She is Alice's and Riley's Mother.
  • Lia: Paul's Mother.
  • Robbie: Paul's Father.
  • Rosie: Add a description of this character.
  • Bonnie: Little girl, a neighbour.
  • Helen: Little girl, a neighbour.
  • Gabriel: Little boy, lives on the island.
  • Diana
  • Monique
Show all 13 characters
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Quotes edit see section history

  • “And everytime you come back, wearing the same face I can't remember”
    Alice
  • Popular Highlights from Kindle Customers
  • Sometimes you couldn’t face the sadness of being forgotten until you felt the comfort of being remembered again.
    Highlighted by 36 Kindle customers
  • Let me love you, but don’t love me back. Do love me and let me hate you for a while. Let me feel like I have some control, because I know I never do.
    Highlighted by 21 Kindle customers
  • They hadn’t quite considered that by trusting one part of your life, you could undermine all the others. By siding with an early version of yourself, preemptively, you would doubt all future selves that conflicted with it.
    Highlighted by 15 Kindle customers
  • So often you wanted to want things but you did not want to get them. You wanted the deficiency but not the cure.
    Highlighted by 14 Kindle customers
  • It was hard to feel the right emotions at the right time. They didn’t come at all when you set a place for them, and they sacked you when you weren’t ready, when you were just innocently flossing your teeth, for example, or eating a bowl of cereal.
    Highlighted by 14 Kindle customers
  • “I told him, though, that he better be good to you. When you came along, I said I’d share you, but I told him to remember that you’re my sister. I loved you first.”
    Highlighted by 13 Kindle customers
  • Could love be continuous? Could you carry it unbroken from childhood to adulthood, wrestling it over the crags and pitfalls of adolescence? Could it come out the other side as the same kind of love, just expressed in new ways? Or were those two kinds of love disjunctive and creepily at odds?
    Highlighted by 13 Kindle customers
  • It was simple to love her and simpler still not to have to acknowledge it.
    Highlighted by 12 Kindle customers
  • “So often this summer I keep thinking: I know I’m holding back. I know I’m waiting. I know I’m afraid to go forward. But I don’t know how to get there from here.”
    Highlighted by 11 Kindle customers
  • Even though he was mean to her, and dismissed her and even forgot her, she still ached for him.
    Highlighted by 9 Kindle customers
Show all 11 quotes from this book

First Sentence edit see section history

Alice waited for Paul on the ferry dock.

Table of Contents edit see section history

1. Waiting
2. You'll Turn Out Ordinary if You're Not Careful
3. Bottles and Stones
4. The Talent for Being a Child
5. Not Getting Ahead
6. God Made Alice for Alice
7. Red, Red Wine
8. The Kind of Person to Be
9. La Bella
10. Take Your Life
11. Look at What You Could Have
12. A Fitting Curse
13. Leaving Badly
14. Closing Up
15. Blame Here and There
16. Somebody's Wedding
17. Cryogenics
18. The Tear in the Net
19. A Stove and a Fire
20. I Loved You First
21. Things Taken and Returned
22. No Person is Ashes
23. From That World into This
24. Not Getting a Motorcycle

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

  1. Ann Brashares (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Original Language: English
Publisher: Riverhead Books
Country: USA
Publication Date: 2007
ISBN: 1594489173
Page Count: 320

Classification edit see section history

Links to Supplemental Material edit see section history

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