Twenty Boy Summer by Sarah Ockler

Okay, so this is partially my own fault because this book has been on my TBR list forever and I haven't read the blurb in over two years. But I picked this up expecting a trashy, fluffy romance and I was not prepared for the depth this book goes.

Maybe 'depth' is the wrong word but this book is not about two teenage girls trying to kiss their way through twenty boys in twenty days. It's actually about one girl trying desperately to grieve the death of her boyfriend without letting her best friend know, all while reconciling her guilt with having new romantic feelings for someone. It's still a YA and don't get me wrong, there are plenty of teenage girl moments and fluffy bits. But damn if it doesn't make a decent stab at depicting grief and complex emotions either.

'The hardest thing is that I'll never know exactly what I lost, how much it should hurt, how long I should keep thinking about him.'

I found the main character Anna to be extremely likeable. You understand why she is friends with Frankie, who could so easily have been turned into the horrible, typical YA wild best friend. Instead you get a friendship that feels very real, as well as actual family relationships and proper parental characters. Ockler somehow manages to capture the almost-mundane side of grief and difficult circumstances. What happens when all the desperate mourning stops and you have to return to everyday life?

'There’s not much anger left between us, just a great divide — like best friends in high school who go to different colleges, lose touch, and move on in parallel lives that never cross until years later, in a random bar or grocery store, and after a brief hug and five minutes of small talk, they both realize that the threads that connected them so long ago have frayed and blown away, leaving nothing to discuss.
So they nod and smile.
And bid one another farewell.'

See that? We've all felt that and damn, Ockler describes it perfectly.

So is this book going to change the world? No, of course not. It is YA and there are some excruciating quotes in here too. But I was pleasantly surprised by the way this book handled grief. It also described being a teenage girl in a fairly accurate way, without a lot of the exaggeration often found in YA fiction. Overall I am glad I finally read it and I feel like I got something from it beyond the trashy fluff I was looking for.

Overall Rating:

.5