[Last Summer is a] slow-building but compelling story that begins innocently enough with an idyll involving three bright and funny young people—two teenage boys and a girl just turned sixteen—and a seagull on a summer-resort seashore island. The shocking end of that episode should prepare one a little, though not entirely, for what comes later when a new girl joins the three. It is an unforgettable—and highly sophisticated—story, for all its apparent simplicity, of young love and explosive violence, which tells as much about the moderately rich, pleasure-seeking, middle-class adult life that shaped them as it does about the young themselves. It's not a pretty story but once started on it I don't think anyone will leave it unfinished.

Katherine Gauss Jackson, in a review of "Last Summer," in Harper's Magazine, Vol. 236, No. 1417, June, 1968, p. 94.