I liked The Starlite Drive-in. I enjoyed the setting (geographic and time period), and I liked Callie Anne as a narrator. She came of age that summer, confronting truths about her parents that were extremely painful and learning more about herself in the process. There’s a growing sense of dread throughout the book (starting with the first chapter, when human bones are found at the drive-in 30 years after the summer in question), which propels the action forward. That said, I didn’t have a hard time putting the book down for a day or two at a time. I could see where it was heading, and for some reason, it didn’t grab me as much as I would have liked. Perhaps it was competing with too much else going on in my life – I focused more on it over the last two days and finished it quickly.
I’ve read some reviews that laud The Starlite Drive-in‘s use of detail to create a very tangible setting – midwest America in the 50s – and I agree. Reynolds does a great job of transporting her readers to another time and place. It’s a bit claustrophobic, in fact – all of the action takes place in a very small part of a very small town – but I think that was intentional. Callie Anne’s life was so circumscribed – as were her parents’ lives – that the events that happened over the course of that relentlessly hot summer seemed almost inevitable.
I received this book as a review copy from HarperCollins (hi FTC!) and thought it was a new book, but it came out in 1997. I think it was re-printed in November 2011.