Sunday 8 June 2014

Review: Summer of Yesterday by Gaby Triana

Back to the Future meets Fast Times at Ridgemont High when Haley’s summer vacation takes a turn for the retro in this totally rad romantic fantasy.

Summer officially sucks. Thanks to a stupid seizure she had a few months earlier, Haley’s stuck going on vacation with her dad and his new family to Disney’s Fort Wilderness instead of enjoying the last session of summer camp back home with her friends. Fort Wilderness holds lots of childhood memories for her father, but surely nothing for Haley. But then a new seizure triggers something she’s never before experienced—time travel—and she ends up in River Country, the campground’s long-abandoned water park, during its heyday.

The year? 1982.

And there—with its amusing fashion, “oldies” music, and primitive technology—she runs into familiar faces: teenage Dad and Mom before they’d even met. Somehow, Haley must find her way back to the twenty-first century before her present-day parents anguish over her disappearance, a difficult feat now that she’s met Jason, one of the park’s summer residents and employees, who takes the strangely dressed stowaway under his wing.

Seizures aside, Haley’s used to controlling her life, and she has no idea how to deal with this dilemma. How can she be falling for a boy whose future she can’t share?


ebook
Expected publication: June 17th 2014 by Simon Pulse 
Genre: Young Adult

Kristine's Thoughts:

I received an advanced readers copy of this book from Simon Pulse via Edelweiss in exchange for an honest review. The expected publication date is June 17, 2014.

Summer of Yesterday is a cute and easy summer read for fans of YA. With a bit of time travel and romance it is sure to appeal to a great number of people.

For me, the setting was the best part of the entire story. I love Disney World and I had no idea that there was once a water park called River Country. In fact, I actually googled it while I was reading to see if it actually did exist or if it was a fictitious place. Once I knew that it was in fact real, I enjoyed the story even more. I found myself relating to Haley's nostalgia around the place and could picture it as plain as day.

The plot itself was a cute concept and I enjoyed the references to clothing, music and movies of the eighties. I also thought it was cute that Haley could interact with her parents as teenagers. Without spoiling the story I was also very satisfied with the ending and feel that it could not have ended any other way.

As much as I liked the book there were just a couple of things that stopped me from loving it and therefore giving it a higher rating. First, I felt like the relationship between Haley and Jason was a little underdeveloped and rushed and because of that I wasn't invested in the outcome of their story. Also, I really wish that there wasn't a connection between Jason and Haley's father because I couldn't stop thinking about it and found it a little creepy, Jason was older than her father and although only a year older than Haley in 1982, in real time he was significantly older and it creeped me out every time I thought about it. I feel like I could have overcome those feelings if the two boys were strangers and not friends.

In the end it was cute story and I am glad that I had the opportunity to read it and to get lost in a little bit of WDW history.




About the Author
GABY TRIANA is a YA author, cake designer, writing workshop instructor, and ghostwriter. Her books, BACKSTAGE PASS, CUBANITA, THE TEMPTRESS FOUR, and RIDING THE UNIVERSE (HarperCollins), have earned the IRA Teen Choice Award, ALA Best Paperbacks, and HISPANIC MAGAZINE'S Good Reads of 2008. Her obsessions include Halloween, Disney World, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, driving fast cars, hosting parties, and spending time with her husband and three boys. Gaby’s romantic time-travel fantasy, SUMMER OF YESTERDAY, about River Country, Disney’s abandoned water park, will be released in June, 2014. She is represented by Deborah Warren of East/West Literary and is currently at work on a magical YA novel called CAKESPELL.

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