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Impactful Small Decisions
What We Found Last Summer follows a group of friends whose summer turns into one filled with danger when they discover a bag of money tied to the mob. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
Childhood experiences and shared cultural memory: shooting off fireworks, building tree forts in the woods, and riding bikes with my friends. Everything we were doing while unsupervised in the 1980s, when the adults weren’t paying attention, which was most of the time. But it’s also influenced by movies like Stand by Me and, for the suburban crime element, TV shows like The Sopranos.
Derek’s bravado and Calvin’s caution create a strong tension. What interested you about writing that kind of friendship dynamic?
I just love that dynamic—the one friend who pushes the other toward the thing he really wants to do but is afraid to—or knows he shouldn’t. Derek is the catalyst, and Calvin is the conscience. Sometimes we need that friend because they push us to experience life. And sometimes that friend gets us into trouble.
The tone shifts between humor and real danger very quickly. How did you manage that balance without losing momentum?
There’s a lot of character work early in the book, and that’s where most of the humor lives. A fair amount of commentary from the characters about each other and their relationships. But when you’re running for your life, you only have time to react, not reflect. I tried to capture that shift as the stakes rise in the book.
If the characters could look back on this summer as adults, what do you think would stay with them the most?
How impactful small decisions are. How final some consequences can be. And how much simpler life felt when you were just playing with your friends.
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But you just don’t know it yet.
When twelve-year-olds Calvin and Derek venture out to an abandoned treehouse at the edge of the woods, they stumble across something they were never meant to see.
What begins as another carefree day—when friendship still feels permanent and summer was meant for fun—quickly turns into something far more serious as the boys realize they’ve brushed up against a world of crime, danger, and secrets that don’t belong to kids.
Some summers you never forget.
Others change you forever.
What We Found Last Summer
What We Found Last Summer is a compact, propulsive coming-of-age thriller built around a very 1980s kid-adventure setup: bikes, woods, fireworks, treehouses, comics, neighborhood rivalries, and parents who are just far enough away for trouble to bloom. The hook is simple and effective: Calvin and Derek find a bag of mob money in an abandoned treehouse, and their summer suddenly becomes much bigger than scraped knees and boyhood dares. The book knows exactly what it’s playing with when it invokes “Kids on bikes,” but it gives that familiar shape a sharper adult edge.
What makes the story work is that it isn’t just nostalgia dressed up as danger. Author Javier De Lucia fills the neighborhood with specific, lived-in relationships: Calvin and his brother Ryan, Calvin and Ravi’s strained friendship, Derek’s restless bravado, Rochelle’s divided loyalty, Lolo’s quiet vigilance, and the uneasy presence of adults whose choices are spilling into the kids’ world. The mob plot gives the novel momentum, but the real texture comes from the way every kid is trying to understand power, loyalty, fear, and belonging with only a twelve-year-old’s emotional toolkit.
The tone is probably the book’s strongest asset. It’s funny in a blunt, profane, very character-driven way, and then it can turn tense fast without feeling like it has changed books. Agent Baker’s line, “We follow the money,” could’ve been pulled from a straight crime novel, but here it sits beside comic-book arguments, treehouse engineering, and kids making decisions they’re nowhere near ready to make. That mix gives the novel its personality: half suburban adventure, half crime story, with the two halves rubbing against each other in interesting ways.
I also liked how the book lets the kids be messy without sanding them down into symbols. Calvin is cautious but tempted, Derek is bold but scared, Ravi is annoying because he’s often right, and Rochelle sees more than the adults realize. Lolo, meanwhile, becomes one of the book’s most memorable presences because he understands the danger before the kids fully do. The story has a real affection for childhood imagination, but it’s also honest about how quickly imagination can collapse when actual violence enters the frame.
By the end, What We Found Last Summer feels like a memory that’s been sharpened into a pulp adventure, then complicated by an adult narrator who knows memory and fiction don’t always sit in separate rooms. The afterword’s idea that “Everything counts” fits the book nicely, because this is a story about the way childhood incidents can become myths, wounds, jokes, and origin stories all at once. It’s a fast read, but it has more going on than its premise suggests, and its best moments come from how confidently it treats a neighborhood summer as something big enough to change everyone who lived through it.
Pages: 105 | ASIN : B0GT26H2ZM
