Another one from the 2020 PopSugar Reading Challenge! I needed a book with twenty or 20 in the title, and thanks to the Goodreads group for this reading challenge, I realized I’ve already read quite a few, but that Twenty Boy Summer by Sarah Ockler (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 2009) was an option. I’d heard of the book before, but hadn’t made the leap, so now was the time- especially since my library had an ebook. Seriously, what would we readers have done during this time without ebooks? Best. Invention. Ever. You know, along with, like, vaccines and antibiotics and the internet in general. 😉
Last year, Anna and Matt were just moving into new romantic territory after a lifetime of friendship when Matt died suddenly, leaving Anna alone, grieving and bewildered. Matt was going to tell his sister Frankie, Anna’s best friend, about the relationship they’d been keeping secret as they figured it out, and now Anna is left to carry the secret by herself. Frankie’s not handling this loss well at all, either, becoming someone Anna barely recognizes. When Frankie’s family decides to make a return vacation trip to their usual California getaway, Anna agrees to come along, but she’s unsure of Frankie’s plan to make this a summer where they meet twenty new boys. Anna’s still not ready to give Matt up.
In California, Frankie’s throwing herself at any available random guy, but Anna’s not really interested until she meets Sam, the first boy to make her feel anything since Matt. Grappling with the guilt over moving on, the weight of her secrets, and Frankie’s out of control behavior and new personality, Anna’s going to have to come to terms with a lot of things on this vacation and maybe risk losing her best friend in the process.
This was a sweet, pain-filled read. Anna is grieving- publicly for the friend she lost, in private for the boy she’d loved since she was ten and who had only begun to love her back. She holds up remarkably well under the guise of having to take care of Frankie, maybe even a little too well. There’s discussion of Frankie barely passing her classes, but Anna seems to have pulled through just fine. I would’ve appreciated seeing some outward sign that she wasn’t entirely okay, because my God, what a terrible loss. (I had a terrrrrrrrrrible crush on a guy all through high school. He didn’t know I was alive for years and no one knew about my crush, and my anxiety brain often told me how horrible it would be if he died and I had to do my grieving all alone, so basically 14 year-old me should have run with this storyline because there’s obviously a market for it…)
Their California beach vacation was a nice armchair trip; lots of description of spending time in the waves and in the sand, which isn’t something I’ll be doing this year. The girls’s constant sneaking out bothered me as a parent; I realize I’m not the intended audience for this, though. There was a lot of discussion of Frankie’s parents basically giving up after Matt died and letting Frankie do whatever she wanted, which I totally get that that could be a thing (I wondered, though, that whether losing Matt so unexpectedly wouldn’t have pushed them to become more protective of Frankie, especially given what caused his death. But to be fair, that would have thrown a spanner in the works of this story, so it may be indicative of a conscious choice the author made to further the story, so I’ll go with that).
Twenty Boy Summer is a story of raw emotion, of secrets, of grief and the ways we deal and don’t deal with it. If you’re grieving, this might not be the right choice for you at the moment; pick it up at a time when you’re feeling strong enough to handle it. It’s a super fast read- I read it in less than a day- and I enjoyed the look into the mind of a teenage girl being asked to carry far more than she ever thought she’d need to.
Visit Sarah Ockler’s website here.
She's probably at the library... 