The Last Summer of the Starlight Drive-In
A novel about film, first jobs, and learning to let go.

About this book:

The smell of hot carbon arcs and crushed limestone rises off the page in this luminous coming-of-age novel set during the final season of a Georgia drive-in. Maeve Mitchell knows every splice, every carbon rod, every temperamental rhythm of the Century projector her grandfather installed in 1958—but she doesn't know how to tell her father she's leaving for Chicago in three months, or how to save a theater that needs seventy-five thousand dollars to survive the digital mandate. As summer burns through its reels—concession-stand confessions, midnight double features, vinegar-syndrome prints and first loves flickering on a fifty-foot screen—Maeve learns that projection is an act of faith: twenty-four still frames a second, stitched together by light into something that looks like motion, looks like life.

With the tactile precision of a projectionist threading film and the emotional clarity of a favorite song on a crackling FM broadcast, *The Last Summer of the Starlight Drive-In* captures that razor-thin moment when the past and future overlap on the same screen. It's a love letter to analog craft, to family businesses fighting obsolescence, to the particular magic of watching stories unfold under the stars while the world keeps changing just beyond the fence line. You'll smell the popcorn, hear the projector's steady thrum, and feel the bittersweet ache of the last summer before everything changes.

For readers who loved the nostalgia of *Cinema Paradiso* and the quiet devastation of *The Last Picture Show*, this is a novel about what we project onto the dark—and what remains when the house lights finally come up.