Book Review: A Love or a Season

Title: A Love or a Season

(Sorry, Amazon, that's an E-Bay picture. The copy I physically own is in better condition, with no black tape. Copies for sale on Amazon include paperbacks.)

Author: Mary Slattery Stolz

Date: 1954

Publisher: Harper & Row

ISBN: none

Length: 257 pages

Quote: “Ah, when to the heart of man / Was it ever less than a treason / to go with the drift of things, / To yield with a grace to reason, / And bow and accept the end / Of a love or a season?”

Harry Lynch, seventeen, and Nan Gunning, sixteen, have been friends all their lives. This summer, the rest of their lives seeming particularly stressful, they fall in love, shortly after Harry has informed “apeman” Phil that Nan is “not interested, that way, in the genus male.” What will become of their love at the end of the summer vacation? Young love, first love, filled with sweet emotion...that rarely lasts even a whole summer.

Although the characters are young, this is not a children's book. Even as a book for high school students it was debatable; it's hard to find, and Amazon didn't even have a picture of it. It was slightly revised from an earlier romance called Two by Two that was marketed to adults. It's just too real for high school kids; after successfully getting past the question of fornication, it ends with a bump of...well, that'd be telling, but let's just say it's an extremely sobering summer for Harry.

In 1954 not everyone in America was sixteen or seventeen and “in love,” but it would’ve been hard to prove it by pop culture. “Serious” books were both ponderous and dreary; “serious” music was ugly; “serious films” were no treat to watch. If artistic expressions were meant to be pleasant and cheerful, publishers demanded that they be romances with happy endings. Mary Stolz was new enough to writing to have to write teen romances to order, but hers were more thoughtful romances, with more thoughtful characters, than average. Among other things Nan and Harry think, quite seriously and rationally, that since they’re not religious and know what their romance is “all about” there’s no reason not to have sex, but soon discover that there is a reason: their parents would go batty.

Then the end of the season comes as an unromantic shock that breaks the “in love” mood. They’re still lifelong friends with congenial personalities, so when Nan says, “I love you, Harry. I’ll love you all my life,” we know that on at least one level she means it. But after a year of separation...? Nan and Harry can’t see ahead to their next summer, and neither can readers.

A Love or a Season never was my personal favorite of Mary Stolz’s young adult novels; there’s a lot of competition—they’re all well done—and Who Wants Music on Monday, with its quirky teenagers who end up uncoupled, was my pick, partly because I liked antiromance in stories about teenagers. I wasn’t opposed to adult characters getting married at the end of a story, but I remember thinking, often, like daily, of how many more teen romances fizzled out in a week or two (and became embarrassing) than developed into True Love. Classmates squealed in the locker room about falling in and out of love; I listened, knew what to expect, and, when hormone surges and hormonal fascinations came along, quietly ignored them to death. I wished more novels were written about teenagers doing that. When a novelist acknowledged that a high school boyfriend was not all it took to equal happily-ever-after for a high school girl, that novelist was telling me that s/he understood something other novelists either didn’t understand, or lied about. A Love or a Season made me think, in my great novel-reading years, 1974-1984, that Stolz could do better than this, and in fact she had.

You, on the other hand, might want to read a realistic, optimistic Teen Romance about preppy types on the North Atlantic beach in the 1950s, and if you do, A Love or a Season is for you. Witty and insightful, cheerful and full of “life” while acknowledging different levels of death, this novel could have been based on something that really happened.

In fact, the ending seems so out of place, I suspect it was based on something that really happened.

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