Such a story as ["Seventeenth Summer"] is tenuous and must be told with perfect timing, with well thought out and careful characterization and, above all, with atmosphere. Maureen Daly has done this expertly, with a technical skill that is above that of the average first novelist. To read the book is to revel for a few hours in small town heat, the slow pace of living,… the dimness of roadside houses where juke boxes play and young couples dance slowly together,… and most of all, the breathless, expectant sense of a seventeen-year-old, that the world is really beginning for her, that she has stepped into life.