(DLA Las Piñas HS LRC) December Book of the Month - The Summer of Firsts and Lasts

The Summer of Firsts and Lasts is a book by American author

Terra Elan McVoy about the life-changing summer of three sisters.

Regarding the conception and development of the book,

McVoy says on her official site (http://terraelan.com/):

"Back when Pure [one of her first books] was finally sent off to the printer, my editor and I brainstormed some ideas for new projects. (Well, she sent me an email of ideas and I did some decoupage and thought about them.) One of her suggestions (actually two of them, combined together) turned into After the Kiss.

Her other suggestion — the one I sat on and kept quiet for awhile — was to write something about sisters. I’m the oldest of three sisters, you see; she thought I might have something to say about that. And I agreed that a sister YA [young adult] book would be great to do. Because being part of a sister triangle is really interesting. And weird. And stupendous. And … hard sometimes.

I wanted to explore the archetypes of eldest, middle, and youngest sister, and the connections between them. I wanted to show the different relationships between eldest-middle, middle-youngest, eldest-youngest and etc. To do this well though, I decided the book had to be narrated by all three girls.

But what sort of environment would all three girls be in at the same time? I wasn’t sure. Home, certainly, but they’d each have their own things going on at school, right? They might not even be in the same school. Which is when I thought: summer camp! Forced togetherness! Of course!

After that I got to pile up all of my best camp fantasies, plus research on contemporary camp practices, interviews with former camp counselors, inspiration from movies like “Wet Hot American Summer,” and “Little Darlings,” and a bunch of other novel-writing tricks and treats, and the result was The Summer of Firsts and Lasts!"