Twenty Boy Summer By: Sarah Ockler

           Daresay I give it five stars?


4 and 1/2 stars out of 5!

I stumbled upon this book. One of my all time favorite authors is Sarah Dessen. Earlier this summer I was watching a video on Barnes and Noble.com in which Sarah was recommending her favorite summer books for young adults. Being such a fan of hers, I immediately jotted down the books she mentioned. Twenty Boy Summer was one of those.

Now, I am not sure if I would have found it without her suggestion. As I said in my last post, I do not buy the books I read; I check 90% of them out at the library. So, after searching for Twenty Boy Summer at my library (including all branches), with no luck, I gave up.

Turns out, I was meant to read this book. During Labor Day weekend my parents and I were at our beach house. On the first day, we went to the library. Guess which book was being displayed in the young adult section? Yep, this one!

Whoa...I didn't mean to write all that even BEFORE I start reviewing the book!

So, as you can see I gave this book an extremely positive review. This is because I honestly loved it. It was really similar to a Sarah Dessen novel, but almost better. Sshhh..I didn't say that! Just looking at the cover, one would think this book was about something positive or just about a summer conquest. Not at all. This book was primarily about loss, grief, coping and moving on. Debut novelist Sarah Ockler handled each of these aspects extremely well. One of the main themes was also friendship, and whether our best friendships can handle betrayal. Warning, however this book is far from innocent, one of the topics is virginity....or rather the losing of said virginity.

I believe the best books are those that when you finish you feel as though the characters really spoke to you, like you have lost a friend. This is how I felt while reading this book, I really felt as though I would want to be friends with the main characters, Anna and her best friend Frankie.

I devoured this book; it was one of those I could not put down. Sometimes, I read a book and it is so good I read it as quickly as I can. This was one of those.

I highly endorse this novel. And, the good news for me is, while I cannot ever read this book fresh again, Sarah Ockler has a new book coming out in December. Fixing Delilah- read about it here, http://sarahockler.com/books/

And, I will leave you with another review that I found on a book blog. The review is really good as is the web site! This blog will give you more of the plot of the book.


http://bookingmama.blogspot.com/2009/06/review-20-boy-summer.html