The Debutante by Kathryn Williams | Rating: ★★★★☆

Revised review; originally posted in 2008. The Debutante has the perfect formula down when it comes to its target audience. Kathryn Williams is charming as always in her writing as she presents to us a lovely coming of age story that appears in a young girls life when her family decides to up and move to a new location and home during her senior year of high school.

Although The Debutante isn’t a groundbreaking novel by any means, it is surely enough to keep you entertained when you’re in the need of something light and fluffy to read in your free time. It manages to take a familiar formula of writing and turns it into something that still remains refreshing and often hilarious. This is something that Williams manages to do with ease and for that, I love her.

Our story opens with teenager, Annie McRae, having just found out that she will be relocating with her parents to Alabama. This news comes about at a very sensitive time: before senior year begins. And as many people know, senior year is often a crucial time in a teenagers life and to be taken away from all that is familiar? It’s rough. Alas, after some begging and hoping her parents are set in their ways to move.

The Lost Summer by Kathryn Williams | Rating: ★★★★☆

"I died one summer, or I almost did. Part of me did. I don’t say that to be dramatic, only because it’s true. It took me a couple years of sifting through memories and reading the journals I wrote while I was laid in bed after it happened to understand what I lost that summer — what we all lost. Also what we gained."

Kathryn Williams’ portrayal of the teenage mind in this coming of age story is genuinely one of the loveliest ones I’ve ever read. Sometimes when we browse through the shelves in the local bookstores Young Adult section we forget to look for those simplistic, but touching, coming of age stories that don’t feature several love triangles, supernatural creatures or abilities, or even ones that take place in the distant future.

The Lost Summer takes place during Helena Waite’s annual trip to her beloved summer camp, Southpoint, when she was seventeen years old. The story features all the elements that mix into the perfect telling of a young woman coming of age in this summery setting: love, friendship and the moment in which you must confront the fact that you are growing and your world is changing.

Williams captures Helena perfectly — penning this character with just the right amount of sweetness and confusion you’d come to expect from a teenage character as she makes the jump from regular camper to part of the “staff”. You get a close view of her struggles in keeping up with those she’s on staff with as she begins to let go of her early experiences with the camp and finds herself maturing into many different choices in how she’d spend her days that summer.