Title: Twenty Boy Summer Author: Sarah Ockler
Published: June 1, 2009
Genre(s): Realistic/Contemporary
Page Count: 290
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:According to Anna’s best friend, Frankie, twenty days in Zanzibar Bay is the perfect opportunity to have a summer fling, and if they meet one boy every day, there’s a pretty good chance Anna will find her first summer romance. Anna lightheartedly agrees to the game, but there’s something she hasn’t told Frankie–she’s already had her romance, and it was with Frankie’s older brother, Matt, just before his tragic death one year ago.
In spite of its title, Twenty Boy Summer is a book that focuses on grief and friendship—and how friendship can change when affected by grief. Unfortunately, I didn’t think Ockler managed to tap into the potential these themes have, and ended up portraying a really screwed up friendship and an unconvincing display of grief and acceptance.
Frankie, her brother Matt, and Anna have been best friends and next door neighbors since they were babies. On her fifteenth birthday, Anna and Matt start a relationship, but a few months later Matt dies in a car accident, and Frankie and Anna are left dealing with the aftermath. A year later, Frankie decides that the two of them will spend the summer chasing boys, ridding Anna of her virginity, and doing things that “normal” teenagers do. Anna, meanwhile, has to deal with her still-secret feelings for Frankie’s dead brother.
At its heart, Twenty Boy Summer is supposed to be about the relationship between Frankie and Anna, and how this summer together brings them closer after drifting apart. The problem is, I didn’t view this friendship as being healthy or something to root for.
Frankie decides that Anna needs to lose her virginity, and pressures her into doing so. She also pressures her into wearing makeup and clothes that Anna would never wear on her own. She also lies about her own personal life, but has the gall to be upset (and throw a major temper tantrum) when Anna lies as well. If your “best friend” pressures you into sex and pokes her nose where it doesn’t belong—someone’s else’s sex life is none of your business—maybe she’s not a very good friend? Now, the “excuse” for all of this is that Frankie is grieving her brother and that grief has turned her into a brat. Okay, fine, I could see that. Except I never found Frankie to be anything but two-dimensional.
As for Anna, sure she’s got a terrible best friend, but couldn’t she stick up for herself? She had sex with a boy after knowing him for about a week because Frankie was attempting to turn sex into a contest. She let Frankie dress her up in clothes and put makeup on her that she admits she would never have worn on her own. Throughout Twenty Boy Summer, Frankie bosses and pushes Anna around, and she never really says “no.” Did Anna even want to lose her virginity? It didn’t seem like it to me. She was still hung up on Matt, but Frankie’s insistence that she have sex was really the big motivator in the entire issue.
So no, I don’t think that Sarah Ockler accomplished what she set out to do with this book. Not at all. I loved another novel of hers, Bittersweet, but this earlier work leaves a lot to be desired. On the other hand, I wouldn’t go so far to say that this book is awful. I wasn’t a fan, no, but I was more ambivalent toward it than anything else. Frankly, it was more boring than annoying. I’m pretty “meh” toward the whole thing, to be honest.
