46 pages • 1-hour read
One Golden Summer
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of illness and death.
The Freeing Power of Love
One Golden Summer is a friends-to-lovers romance story that explores the complications of developing intimate relationships. Alice and Charlie meet at difficult times. Alice is healing from a breakup and is trying to rediscover herself as an artist; her understanding of relationships is guided by past disappointments. Meanwhile, Charlie is facing medical concerns that have ignited his fear of dying at a young age. He doesn’t want to pursue a relationship he assumes he will not be around for. However, Alice and Charlie’s time together frees them from these emotional constraints.
Both Alice and Charlie begin the novel defining love in terms of fear. Alice has never found it easy to foster authentic connections with romantic partners. Her internal monologues about the potential of long-term relationships are harried, as their staccato rhythm underscores how few functional marriages she has personal knowledge of:
Over and over, I keep falling. Over and over, I keep getting my heart broken. Everlasting love may have existed for my grandmother’s generation, but I’m beginning to think it’s a modern myth. Heather’s divorced. My parents are, too. They pulled the plug on their marriage three years ago, right after the twins left home. I held out hope that the separation was temporary until the very end, when the divorce was finalized, and Mom changed her last name (74-75).
In this passage, Alice’s past dictates her response to the present. Having seen the disappointment and hurt of her sister and parents, and having felt romantic heartbreak firsthand with Trevor and Oz, Alice fears committing to Charlie, lest she expose herself to even more pain. Charlie is similarly living in fear, as he’s convinced he will die at 35 just like his father. He believes that getting involved with Alice will only hurt her.
Once Alice and Charlie learn to live in the moment, letting go of the illusion of control and embracing the freeing power of spontaneity, they’re better able to commit to one another. No longer rooted in past examples, they can use even seeming setbacks as stepping stones to an eventual happily ever after: Their breakup and Charlie’s concealed health crisis propel Alice and Charlie towards reconciliation rather than mutual resentment. Fear of the future turns into optimism about what is to come as Alice and Charlie decide to make a life together. The ending reiterates a primary trope of the romance genre: True love can set anyone free if they open their heart to it.
The Transformative Power of Place
Alice’s summer in Barry’s Bay conveys how particular geographical settings and physical locations can transform one’s sense of self and outlook. In Toronto, Alice feels trapped by reminders of her former relationship and her work responsibilities. She’s lonely, dissatisfied, and uninspired. However, once she relocates to Kamaniskeg Lake, Alice begins to set herself free.
The novel’s lakeside town and its proximity to a bucolic natural world represent peace, enlightenment, and renewal. On the lake, Alice is surrounded by the glinting bay, beautiful trees, rock faces, cool breezes, and fresh, natural scents. The environment refreshes Alice’s physical senses, attunes her artistic eye, and offers emotional and spiritual rejuvenation. One afternoon alone on the little island demonstrates these healing aspects:
I photographed every angle of this shoreline. I tromped through the bush and documented birds and bugs, mushrooms and moss. I snapped pale green lichens clinging to rocks and the wildflowers that grew along the contours of the driveway. Columbines and lilies and asters. […] I float on my back, arms spread, and stare at the dimming sky, the deepening purple and red (37-38).
The sense-rich description offers dramatic contrast to Alice’s condo in Toronto; there, surfaces are cold and white, while here the natural world is full of pleasure—the floral smell of “Columbines and lilies and asters,” the tactile satisfaction of “tromping” and “floating,” the visual sumptuousness of “pale green lichens” and a “purple and red” sunset, and the chirping and buzzing of “birds and bugs.” Unlike her urban home, her new natural surroundings aren’t rigidly ordered or curated. The image of her in the water with arms spread wide symbolizes her desire to liberate herself; instead of focusing on the minutiae of work, she can contemplate the larger scope of existence: “I’m overwhelmed with how big the galaxy is and how insignificant I am” (38).
Alice’s time in Barry’s Bay not only changes her for the better but also allows her to internalize lessons that she brings back to lessen the sterility of her Toronto space. Physical habits remain: She starts swimming and stops presenting a manicured facade to the world. Even more important are the emotional habits: The unpredictability of the natural world lessens her worries about the future; when she returns to the city, enjoying the present paradoxically translates into optimism about things to come. The liberating summer mood Alice discovers in Barry’s Bay—one defined by light and warmth—transforms her approach to life in all seasons.
The Importance of Finding One’s Voice
Alice’s self-discovery journey is about reconciling her needs and desires with her professional aspirations. At the novel’s start, Alice feels limited by her photography assignments, which often compromise her artistic vision. Her shoot for Swish will be edited to make the models adhere more rigidly to beauty standards. The photograph Elyse is displaying at the gallery opening does not represent what Alice considers her best art. However, Alice finds it difficult to make her voice be heard at work. Instead, she finds herself sacrificing what she believes in to please her editor and her gallerist. Lack of confidence in herself disempowers her and undermines her identity as a photographer.
Alice’s time in Barry’s Bay alters her perspective on her professional challenges. In particular, her “One Golden Summer” photo reminds her of who she was when she first fell in love with photography—an era of her personal life that felt more genuine and uninhibited: “I’ve been chasing this kind of perfection in an image. The emotion. The movement. The sense of timelessness. […] The photo is the first chapter of my origin story, the beginning of my love affair with photography” (11). This early “perfect” photo symbolizes the inextricable entanglement between artistic passion and self-expression. She is still proud of this image 15 years later, because it captures her identity and vision. Throughout her time on the lake as an adult, Alice gradually works her way back to this version of herself.
Spending time with Charlie fuels her artistic rebirth as she photographs everything they do together. As she considers the kind of person she is around him, Fortune recasts the language around the disappointing Swish assignment. Unlike the models she captured, Alice can appear as she is: “I don’t have to be a perfectly edited version of myself—it’s okay to have a few bumps. And I don’t have to try” (172). Just as the unedited photos she submitted to Swish honored the models’ “bumps,” so too does Alice embrace her own blemishes and quirks. The result is being better able to embrace her authenticity as an artist. At the novel’s end, the scene at Alice’s gallery opening conveys how much she’s grown professionally—enough to display a completely unedited self-portrait.
Unlock every key theme and why it matters
Get in-depth breakdowns of the book’s main ideas and how they connect and evolve.
- Explore how themes develop throughout the text
- Connect themes to characters, events, and symbols
- Support essays and discussions with thematic evidence