[Review] Summer of Yesterday - Gaby Triana

Title of Book : Summer of Yesterday
Author : Gaby Triana
Publisher : Simon Pulse

Summer officially sucks. Thanks to a stupid seizure she had a few months earlier, Haley’s stuck going on vacation with her dad and his new family to Disney’s Fort Wilderness instead of enjoying the last session of summer camp back home with her friends. Fort Wilderness holds lots of childhood memories for her father, but surely nothing for Haley. But then a new seizure triggers something she’s never before experienced—time travel—and she ends up in River Country, the campground’s long-abandoned water park, during its heyday.

The year? 1982.

And there—with its amusing fashion, “oldies” music, and primitive technology—she runs into familiar faces: teenage Dad and Mom before they’d even met. Somehow, Haley must find her way back to the twenty-first century before her present-day parents anguish over her disappearance, a difficult feat now that she’s met Jason, one of the park’s summer residents and employees, who takes the strangely dressed stowaway under his wing.

Seizures aside, Haley’s used to controlling her life, and she has no idea how to deal with this dilemma. How can she be falling for a boy whose future she can’t share?

Summer of Yesterday is a story about a girl named Haley who has to spend her summer with her father and his new family at Disney’s Fort Wilderness. She didn’t like the idea of spending a vacation there so when three other teens asked her to meet them with a potential teens summer agenda, she just couldn’t wait. Turned out they asked her to join them playing treasure hunt. Despite of the risk having a seizure (which wasn’t really a big deal, according to her), she agreed to join them playing treasure hunt. While she was exploring an abandoned water park called River Country (in an attempt to complete one of the tasks of the treasure hunt list), she had a seizure. Apparently this time the seizure was quite a big deal because it made her time travel back to the time when River Country still opened for public. So she’s back to the time when her father and mother were still teenagers. In the past, she also met a cute boy named Jason whom she knows she couldn’t be with. We’ll see how she tries to figure out a way to go back to the future while getting to know her father and mother’s teenage self.

Summer of Yesterday is a fun summer reading. I love the retro setting and the 80s pop culture reference in the book. Haley is an amusing character. She’s sarcastic and though sometimes she makes dumb decision, she often makes funny remarks on things around her. It’s entertaining to see how Haley reacts to the situation that she’s in. 

This is the first time I read a time travel YA book and I enjoyed it. The fact that Triana used a Disney’s park as a setting in this novel intrigues me. I’m a fan of Disney but I never went to any of Disney’s parks. So it’s nice to experience it a bit through a book.

As I see from the description in the book (because I’ve never been there), Disney’s Fort Wilderness, especially River Country, is one big water park. I think it would be helpful if they include a brief map of the water park in the book. But Triana did a good job with the description and the writing is engaging.

I thought I would see more of the family side being explored in this book. But this book is more about the romance. In the part where Haley travels back in time, the story is mainly about how she deals with her feeling for Jason while trying to find a way to the future.

I recommend this book for those who like a light, fluffy contemporary YA story about time travel. It’s a short book and it’s easy to read. It didn’t take much of my time to read it. Yet Summer of Yesterday is still a fun read.

I read it for free at Pulseit.com.