All Summer Long by Amelia Joy
“What did I want, what did I want? I wrote long diary entries and tried to write a list: I missed summer, I missed the city. I wanted adventure, travel, projects. I wanted an explosion of sex and flavour and neon and bass. I wanted a life so fat I could rip the meat off its bones.”
In All Summer Long, the debut YA novella from Amelia Joy, we meet Olivia and Miles, two nineteen-year-olds in the midst of a sweltering Adelaide summer who are about to discover just how heated things can get.
Olivia dreams of writing and getting out of the small South Australian town she’s lived in her whole life. At university, she keeps herself to herself and saves her weekends for spending time with her boyfriend, Ryan, “subsisting on sex and snacks and each other.” Her life seems to be travelling along the trajectory she thinks it should - that is, until she meets Miles.
Enigmatically drawn to each other from the moment they lock eyes, Olivia’s world is turned upside down as Miles tugs her into his life, introducing her to everyone he knows as his ‘best friend.’ Popular, charming and disarming, Miles makes Olivia begin to question everything she thought she knew about love, lust and desire. Their relationship barely clings to the threads of being platonic, as the pair grow closer, seeking out any possible moment they can to spend time together. Despite both being involved with other people, their connection becomes an addiction neither want to give up:
“In the quiet of that night, something monumental shifted inside me. All I had ever craved was the hot rush of being wanted, and that was all I ever had. But this was more than that. This was something unfathomable.”
Just as Olivia thinks she might finally be getting the guy of her dreams, Miles drops a bombshell: he plans to propose to his girlfriend of five years.
Separated into ‘Before’ and ‘After’ their love affair, we see how deeply the experience has knocked Olivia and the blame she takes on for its dissolution, despite both of them being willing parties:
“I felt ashamed of my intensity. I had wrapped myself around him, claimed him as my gravity, and it would flay me alive.”
Years after their summer together, as Olivia struggles to determine what it is she wants to do with her life, Miles enters the scene once more. This should be an opportunity for her to finally put to bed everything unresolved between them, but even though Miles announces he has a new love, Olivia can’t seem to draw herself away from his intoxication. She is left once more on the outside:
“For years, I waited for him. All I wanted was for him to tell me that I was the only one … Instead, I played the siren because the hardest pill to swallow was the truth. He didn’t love me.”
I would have loved a happier ending for Olivia or at least some form of self-reflection and growth. There are many tiny threads that Joy begins to weave through Oliva’s narrative - family bonds, growing up, deciding what we want out of life, doing the ‘right’ things - and I could easily see this becoming a full-length novel. It would be great to see Olivia finally learning that age-old lesson that to be truly loved by another, we must first love ourselves.
All Summer Long charts the heady turmoil of youth, first loves and the often painful lessons of uncovering who we are and what we want in life. Joy creates two authentic characters who are too wrapped in the thick of each other to see the reality of their situation - the double-edged blessing and curse of youth. This is a sensual, full swing into an experience many people will be familiar with: the ripping off of the bandaid, letting someone get genuinely close to us for the first time and being brave enough to see where the rabbit hole leads.
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Many thanks to the author for an advanced review copy.
All Summer Long is out 1 July 2021, available from Lore and Lunar.
Elaine Mead is a freelance writer and book reviewer, currently residing in Hobart, Tasmania. She is passionate about the ways we can use literature to learn from our experiences to become more authentic versions of ourselves and obsessed with showing you photos of her Dachshund puppy. You can find her online at www.wordswithelaine.com.
