During the summer of 1946, twenty-year-old Elizabeth is doing what she has dreamed of since she was a little girl: working in the theatre. Elizabeth is passionate about her work and determined to learn all she can at the summer theatre company on the sea where she is an apprentice actress. She's never felt so alive. And soon she finds another passion: Kurt Canitz, the dashing young director of the company, and the first man Elizabeth's ever kissed who has really meant something to her. Then Elizabeth's perfect summer is profoundly shaken when Kurt turns out not to be the kind of man she thought he was.
This is a simply story, set in the world of 1940's theater without really entering it. The focus of the story is so much about Elizabeth that it doesn't have room to really immerse the reader into the theater world of that time, or even the world at large of the era. It's very much a character study and Elizabeth is a simply character, in part because she's young and innocent, and it's that movement out of innocence that this story is about. It's simple and it's straight forward and it alludes to a really interesting character in Elizabeth's mother and Elizabeth's own struggle with her relationship with her mother was nearly the most compelling part.
But, because of the simplicity of her character and because that's nearly all the book is, as a whole I found it nice but not much more than that.
