The Summer of Apartment X

Susan Patrick is a librarian at Ryerson University in Toronto.

The summer in question is the one between high school and university for
Fred and his friends—a summer in which they are preoccupied by girls,
cars, and the newly found freedom of living away from parents. Apartment
X is a squalid set of rooms, which can be accessed only through a shower
stall, in a small Ontario beach town. This novella is a nostalgic look
back at a slice of time in the early 1970s. Choyce has created realistic
characters with dialogue that rings true. Fred, an idealistic, romantic,
teenage boy looking to fall in love, ultimately finds sex, falls out of
love, and feels betrayed. (At the local movie theatre where he works as
an usher, the mysterious and beautiful ticket seller becomes less
appealing when she leaves her glass booth and her Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde personality is revealed.) There is a wistful quality to the
story—a sense of disillusionment and loss of innocence that is shown
as inevitable with the passage into adulthood. In The Summer of
Apartment X, Choyce has crafted a heartfelt story with which many
readers will be able to identify.