Bibliography: Ockler, Sarah. (June 2009). Twenty Boy Summer. New York: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers. ISBN: 9780316051590
Review: When I think about telling someone about the kinds of stories I like to read, I always wonder if inside they would be shaking their head: Always knew she was a little strange. I really enjoy books about people experiencing the most basic and most genuine human predicaments and emotions. So for example, I like to read about war and apocalyptic science fiction and survival stories because when faced with extreme circumstances, the truest actions and emotions are revealed. And I like to read about grief. Not the sappy Lurlene McDaniels story, but the kind of true fiction that sometimes is produced by the perfect combination of characters and events and words and emotions and even a little humor or wit.
Twenty Boy Summer is one of those books. (No, not the apocalyptic/war/survival kind. The coming to terms with the death of someone you loved, who mattered, who was taken away too soon.) Anna lives next door to sister and brother Frankie and Matt, and she figures she has known them basically her whole life. They are inseparable. At her 15th birthday party, Anna makes a wish for Matt to kiss her. (Somewhere along the way she fell in love with him.) When the kiss happens later that day, they are both swept awaybut worried. What will Frankie think? Matt knows he needs to be the one to tell her, but it has to be when the moment is right. Until then, their relationship exists of midnight meetings and stolen moments and kisses. Unfortunately, the talk never takes place. Driving back together from getting ice cream, an undiscovered hole in Matt’s heart made itself known. He died of a broken heart, Anna thought.
A hard year follows, the threesome is now a twosome. Anna is there for Frankie, but decides she can’t tell her about Matt, that thir relationship has to be kept a secret forever. When Anna is invited to come along on the Frankie’s annual family vacation, she agrees, but wonders about Frankie’s plan for the absolutely best summer ever: hooking up with 20 boys in 20 days. She wants to tell Frankie about Matt, about their feelings for each other, but she can’t. So she goes along with the plan and realizes that she has room in her heart for someone else.
There are many things I loved about this story. First, the protrayal of the grieving process is shown in several ways through the different characters. Frankie is a little rebellious, she has started smoking and acting out a little bit. She really just wants her parents to pay attention to her. Anna is outwardly grieving with Frankie, but has her own silent pain on the inside. Frankie’s mom keeps redoing the house over and over again, and longs for perfect meals and family events as the sign that everything is all right. The second is that there are many beautiful moments, beautifully written and simply told. Making sand angels on the beach, talking on the porch in the middle of the night and realizing someone knows your secret, stealing away with a boy under the stars and coming to realize you can love again, getting caught in the rain with your best friend after the last bus has left for the night. This is a book about grief, a book about love, a book about moving forward and figuring out who you are when you’ve lost someone and something that you weren’t even quite sure what it was.
Readalikes:
The first book I really remember reading about grief, and one of the few young adult books I read in high school was Say Goodnight, Gracie by Julie Reece Deaver. Morgan must face life on her own when best friend Jimmy is killed by a drunk driver. Deals with the immediate grief and emotions that follow his death.
A book that had me both crying and laughing was Good Grief by Lolly Winston. This is young widow Sophie’s story of trying to fathom life as a widow. She does many crazy things in her grief, driving her car through the garage door, buying and forgetting Thanksgiving pies in the trunk of her car, showing up to work in her bathrobe. Her boss tells her she needs a break, and break she does, all the way to another life with her best friend in the Pacific Northwest.
When Betta Nolan’s husband John dies, she honors the promise she made to him to carry out the plans they had for the rest of their lives on her own. She sells their house, packs up the car and drives across the country until she finds a small town that feels right. In The Year of Pleasures, Berg challenges that there are rules or norms of behavior for how someone has to grieve.
