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There’s something achingly relatable about the world Abigail E. Myers creates in “The Last Analog Teenagers”, even if you’ve never shoplifted cucumber melon lotion or waited by a landline for someone to call. Myers’s debut collection manages to capture that specific loneliness of adolescence with such precision that you can practically smell the mall food court and feel the static of your old fleece hoodie.
Set in the fictional town of Carvel, Pennsylvania, these nine interconnected stories follow a group of teenagers navigating the final years of the 1990s before smartphones would fundamentally alter what it means to grow up. This is basically the last generation to make their mistakes without digital footprints. The opening story, “Stolen,” immediately establishes Myers’s knack for describing teenage experience and finding the profound in the mundane with a story about a young teenage girl stealing for the first time. Our unnamed narrator doesn’t shoplift for thrills—rather, she steals for another, carefully selecting bath products for Holly, the popular girl she’s desperately trying to reach.
Indeed, Myers unapologetically but with restraint writes about queerness in this largely pre-visibility era. Her characters exist in that painful space before identity has language, where same-sex attraction manifests as intense friendships and lingering glances. But what makes this collection particularly readable is its additional attention to class and neglect. These aren’t privileged suburban teens angsting about college applications; they’re working-class kids navigating absent parents, economic precarity, and the kind of responsibilities that make you grow up fast.
The collection’s linked structure creates a satisfying sense of community. Characters drift between stories as protagonists and supporting players, reflecting the way teenage social circles actually work, how someone who barely registers in your story might be the hero of their own. Myers has a particular talent for party scenes and group dynamics, showing how adolescent gatherings can be simultaneously the most important and most disappointing events in a teenager’s life. When Melinda’s birthday party gets busted, it’s not a dramatic climax but a deflating reminder of how little control young people actually have.
The period details help bring the book to life. AIM messenger, Claire’s accessories, and Smashing Pumpkins CDs aren’t deployed for cheap recognition but to immerse readers in this time when they were the actual currency of teenage social life. While Myers’s understated prose is generally a strength, occasionally the restraint tips into opacity. Some emotional beats could use more development, and a few characters remain frustratingly sketchy, but perhaps that is inevitable for a short story collection. Yet these are mostly subjective issues.
Regardless, “The Last Analog Teenagers” is a great read of which I really enjoyed all the stories. Myers understands that every generation of teenagers faces the same fundamental challenges—being seen, finding love, claiming agency—regardless of when and where they were born. These kids made their mix CDs track by track, stole moments of privacy on landlines, and lived with a kind of anonymity that’s nearly impossible to imagine now. The result is a subtly gripping debut that announces Myers as a significant new voice in coming-of-age fiction.
You can get your copy of “The Last Analog Teenagers” here!
