The Girl from Summer and Other Stories

Raffetto's first collection assembles four novellas about obsessions, conquering personal demons, and maturing into epiphanies, with every protagonist seeking to find out who they are and what they can do by breaking into greater independence. "Young Scott and Zelda" depicts author F. Scott Fitzgerald's absolute certainty of both his budding writing and his love for Zelda Sayre. The title piece brings together two tormented people, rape survivor Kristen Boyd and Holden Helms, a baseball player with a checkered past, who try finding healing and purpose as they discover each other. "Inside %E2%80%9875" and "Seeds from %E2%80%9879" are coming-of-age stories filled with fights and lessons about standing one's ground. Raffetto's style often feels languid, many parts of the novellas are episodic, and anticlimactic epilogues fizzle the raw tension in "Young" and "%E2%80%9875." But they also feel like peeks at the most intense days of young lives, and all will appeal to fans of coming-of-age stories.