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The Last of Eden
During her sophomore and junior years at boarding school, Michelle must confront several painful situations which make her realize the place is not the "Eden" she once thought it was.
153 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1980
About the author
Stephanie S. Tolan
40 books97 followersStephanie S. Tolan's earliest memories involve books. Those that were read to her and those she read to herself, often late at night with a flashlight under the covers. She always thought there was a special magic in the little black marks on paper that could turn into whole worlds and real people. Born in Ohio and raised in Wisconsin, she wrote her first story in the fourth grade. It was thrilling to discover she could make the magic herself, and she decided then and there to be a writer.
Other ambitions came and went, but writing stayed on, and she majored in creative writing at Purdue University, then went on to a Master's Degree in English. Marriage and the sudden addition to her life of three young stepsons, and then a son, forced writing into the nooks and crannies, but she wrote poetry and plays for adults as she taught college English. In the mid-seventies, Stephanie began working in the Poets-in-the-Schools program in Pennsylvania. Her first group of students were fourth and fifth graders, and she found among them a new generation of intense readers, still using the flashlight-under-the-covers trick.
The difference, she felt, was less in the children themselves than in the fast-changing world they lived in. Her writing for children and young adults, beginning with Grandpa -- And Me in 1978, has reflected that contemporary world.
Stephanie Tolan is also well known as an advocate for extremely bright children. She co-authored the award-winning nonfiction book, Guiding the Gifted Child, and has written many articles about the challenges gifted "asynchronous" children and adults face as they find a way to fit into their world. She lectures throughout the country to audiences of parents, educators and counselors attempting to find ways to meet the children's needs. Her experiences with these "amazing, off-the-charts" young people inspired the themes of Welcome to the Ark, a powerful novel about four brilliant young misfits in a world teetering on destruction.
Stephanie Tolan currently lives in Charlotte, NC, with her husband.
Other ambitions came and went, but writing stayed on, and she majored in creative writing at Purdue University, then went on to a Master's Degree in English. Marriage and the sudden addition to her life of three young stepsons, and then a son, forced writing into the nooks and crannies, but she wrote poetry and plays for adults as she taught college English. In the mid-seventies, Stephanie began working in the Poets-in-the-Schools program in Pennsylvania. Her first group of students were fourth and fifth graders, and she found among them a new generation of intense readers, still using the flashlight-under-the-covers trick.
"They brought back to me that special reading joy that most adults, even the readers among us, have lost, and I wanted to try my hand at writing for those kids, so like myself at their age and yet so different."
The difference, she felt, was less in the children themselves than in the fast-changing world they lived in. Her writing for children and young adults, beginning with Grandpa -- And Me in 1978, has reflected that contemporary world.
Stephanie Tolan is also well known as an advocate for extremely bright children. She co-authored the award-winning nonfiction book, Guiding the Gifted Child, and has written many articles about the challenges gifted "asynchronous" children and adults face as they find a way to fit into their world. She lectures throughout the country to audiences of parents, educators and counselors attempting to find ways to meet the children's needs. Her experiences with these "amazing, off-the-charts" young people inspired the themes of Welcome to the Ark, a powerful novel about four brilliant young misfits in a world teetering on destruction.
Stephanie Tolan currently lives in Charlotte, NC, with her husband.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
May 28, 2017
This is fascinating to me mostly in how different it is from contemporary boarding-school novels. American boarding schools have changed a ton in the last thirty years, and The Last of Eden reflects that.
In a contemporary book (and yes, I'm generalising, but bear with me), Mike (short for Michelle) would be much more likely to begin her time at boarding school at the start of the book. Here we have instead her second year and half her third year, meaning that things like how her friendships developed and so on are relegated to backstory. That's not a criticism—it means that the book's energies can lie elsewhere—though I would argue that we lose some side-character depth because of it. (I do kind of love that some of the backstory anecdotes are about, like, 'an epidemic of religious fervor' (15)...) This was published in 1980, and it's treated as positively scandalous that there will be a male teacher living on campus for the first time in the school's history. That does feel a little dated to me—my boarding school, which opened in 1980, was coeducational from the very beginning, with male and female students and staff living on campus.
But I digress. The male teacher is and isn't the problem here—the conflict focuses on Mike's roommate, Marty, who in a school full of very wealthy girls is snubbed for being too wealthy and too good at everything. She's an artist at heart, and when she takes instruction from the new art teacher (whose husband is that new on-campus teacher), a jealous classmate starts a rumour that Marty and the teacher are lesbians. Never mind that there's a possibility (never fully cleared up) that the jealous classmate, who is fifteen, is having some kind of fling with the male teacher; nobody in the book seems to think there are any real concerns there. No, nigh on the entire school is scandalised by the thought that there might be lesbians.
I'm again not criticising the book for this—more the culture in which it was written. We have a husband who cannot bear to see his wife more successful than he is, a school that only cares if a student is sleeping with a teacher if both student and teacher are female...oh, it's terribly strange.
I do rather wish that the book had stuck to a single year. The events of Mike's junior year turn out to be directly related, but it takes some time for the connections to come to fruition, and there's still a lot left unexplained. Sylva...why so evil? Was she trying to pull Marty towards lesbianism or away from it? (I did find it pretty funny that this wasn't really clear, but...I also want to know! I don't understand Sylva.) Tolan treads an interesting line here, compassionate towards Marty yet without much hope that possible lesbianism could become less scandalous.
Mike initially thinks of boarding school as Eden, as a reprieve from her grief-stricken household following the deaths of her father and brother. This year and a half shows her otherwise, despite the fact that very little of the book's events have to do directly with Mike. It's pretty odd at times but also pretty fascinating.
In a contemporary book (and yes, I'm generalising, but bear with me), Mike (short for Michelle) would be much more likely to begin her time at boarding school at the start of the book. Here we have instead her second year and half her third year, meaning that things like how her friendships developed and so on are relegated to backstory. That's not a criticism—it means that the book's energies can lie elsewhere—though I would argue that we lose some side-character depth because of it. (I do kind of love that some of the backstory anecdotes are about, like, 'an epidemic of religious fervor' (15)...) This was published in 1980, and it's treated as positively scandalous that there will be a male teacher living on campus for the first time in the school's history. That does feel a little dated to me—my boarding school, which opened in 1980, was coeducational from the very beginning, with male and female students and staff living on campus.
But I digress. The male teacher is and isn't the problem here—the conflict focuses on Mike's roommate, Marty, who in a school full of very wealthy girls is snubbed for being too wealthy and too good at everything. She's an artist at heart, and when she takes instruction from the new art teacher (whose husband is that new on-campus teacher), a jealous classmate starts a rumour that Marty and the teacher are lesbians. Never mind that there's a possibility (never fully cleared up) that the jealous classmate, who is fifteen, is having some kind of fling with the male teacher; nobody in the book seems to think there are any real concerns there. No, nigh on the entire school is scandalised by the thought that there might be lesbians.
I'm again not criticising the book for this—more the culture in which it was written. We have a husband who cannot bear to see his wife more successful than he is, a school that only cares if a student is sleeping with a teacher if both student and teacher are female...oh, it's terribly strange.
I do rather wish that the book had stuck to a single year. The events of Mike's junior year turn out to be directly related, but it takes some time for the connections to come to fruition, and there's still a lot left unexplained. Sylva...why so evil? Was she trying to pull Marty towards lesbianism or away from it? (I did find it pretty funny that this wasn't really clear, but...I also want to know! I don't understand Sylva.) Tolan treads an interesting line here, compassionate towards Marty yet without much hope that possible lesbianism could become less scandalous.
Mike initially thinks of boarding school as Eden, as a reprieve from her grief-stricken household following the deaths of her father and brother. This year and a half shows her otherwise, despite the fact that very little of the book's events have to do directly with Mike. It's pretty odd at times but also pretty fascinating.
March 14, 2015
This one I believe I got from the "To Read" pile of my sister from HER childhood. I find it interesting to see how homosexuality was handled in the seventies versus today. In some ways we have come so far. In others? Not so much.
May 2, 2022
I honestly don't know what I was expecting from an lgbt related book from 1980, but it wasn't exactly this. Honestly, from the way Mike described her friends, especially Marty, I was fully expecting her to be gay and something to develop between her and Marty. Instead, Marty gets involved in a short-lived affair with a barely developed character in the last four chapters that isn't even confirmed to be real. Obviously I didn't expect it to handle lesbian themes with the same nuance and understanding we have today, but even so, it felt like there could have been so much more done or worked upon within the actual plot. I feel like the book could have been longer, as the first year gets so much time devoted to it and the second one rushes by in a matter of chapters. I do like a lot of what's there in the book. It's written in an interesting way and there's a lot of emotional themes that felt deep, especially with how Mike views the relationships in her life.However, it feels like it just comes up short in a lot of ways, with the strange viewing of lesbians as some sort of diseased-ridden mongrels who want to prey on girls just being one of them.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 18, 2021
What can you do when you get seduced by both lesbianism /and/ the church. This book is wild!
January 23, 2022
Although I find many YA novels from the ‘80s as fresh and readable as ever, The Last of Eden is just a historical artifact, and a seriously depressing one at that. It’s kind of a slightly updated version of The Children’s Hour. I heard of The Last of Eden from the Cliquey Pizza website, which has compilations of covers of ‘80s YA novels, and if you loved to read these books as a kid that website is like heaven. From the cover, it was clear that it was about a girl’s boarding school, and I imagined it would be like Tell Me If The Lovers Are Losers by Cynthia Voigt, so I got it out of the library.
Not that much actually happens to the main character, Michelle known as Mike. It’s mainly about what happens to her friends. For the first time, a man comes to teach at Mike’s elite all-female boarding school, and almost immediately The end!
As an anthropological document of social mores and homophobia from 1980, this novel is killer diller, but I hate to think of a teenager reading this book and coming away feeling bad about themselves because basically the message of the whole book is an extremely dated and damaging one. (That a same sex relationship destroys lives and is so horrifying that it makes people puke. Plus a cavalier attitude towards sexual abuse.) I’m not meaning to hate on the author. It was progressive at that time to have any gay content in YA at all, and it’s hard not to be a mouthpiece for the beliefs of your time. The only other one of her novels I've read, I loved.
The weird thing is that my local library system is constantly de-accessioning old YA books and selling them. I’ve found all sorts of magnificent, classic treasures that baffle me as to why the library doesn’t want them on the shelves any longer. And yet they’ve decided to hang on to this disheartening novel.
Not that much actually happens to the main character, Michelle known as Mike. It’s mainly about what happens to her friends. For the first time, a man comes to teach at Mike’s elite all-female boarding school, and almost immediately The end!
As an anthropological document of social mores and homophobia from 1980, this novel is killer diller, but I hate to think of a teenager reading this book and coming away feeling bad about themselves because basically the message of the whole book is an extremely dated and damaging one. (That a same sex relationship destroys lives and is so horrifying that it makes people puke. Plus a cavalier attitude towards sexual abuse.) I’m not meaning to hate on the author. It was progressive at that time to have any gay content in YA at all, and it’s hard not to be a mouthpiece for the beliefs of your time. The only other one of her novels I've read, I loved.
The weird thing is that my local library system is constantly de-accessioning old YA books and selling them. I’ve found all sorts of magnificent, classic treasures that baffle me as to why the library doesn’t want them on the shelves any longer. And yet they’ve decided to hang on to this disheartening novel.
April 29, 2021
My favorite book of all time. Read too many times to count. I own 3 copies!
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews