Daisy Alpert Florin Has Questions About Consent

Daisy Alpert Florin’s debut novel, My Last Innocent Year, is a rewind to the late ‘90s. Our protagonist, Isabel, is a young Jewish woman from New York pursuing a creative writing degree at a prestigious liberal arts college in New Hampshire. After Isabel is assaulted by a peer at the start of her last semester, she confides in her roommate, Deborah, for support, only to find that Deborah isn’t willing to let this incident go without taking punitive measures. Meanwhile, Isabel’s creative writing professor, Connelly, begins to express an interest in her that goes well beyond her short stories, resulting in a secret relationship rife with questions about consent.

But even that description is colored by my personal read on the book: Isabel herself likely would not say was assaulted; marketing copy for the novel describes the encounter as “nonconsenual.” This distinction ties into the bigger picture questions that dominate the novel: What counts as violence? Whose definition matters? Isabel’s college experience spans