Review: Twenty Boy Summer

Twenty Boy Summer by Sarah Ockler
Find it at a local indie!

• Why I read it: Wesley Scroggins, book banning, coming of age, albatrosses of all kinds
• Disclosure: Won a copy from Hannah at Paperback Treasures. Thanks!

"Don't worry, Anna. I'll tell her, okay? Just let me think about the best way to do it."
"Okay."
"Promise me? Promise you won't say anything?"
"Don't worry." I laughed. "It's our secret, right?"
According to her best friend Frankie, twenty days in Zanzibar Bay is the perfect opportunity to have a summer fling, and if they meet one boy ever 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 that kind of romance, and it was with Frankie's older brother, Matt, just before his tragic death one year ago.
Beautifully written and emotionally honest, this is a debut novel that explores what it truly means to love someone and what it means to grieve, and ultimately, how to make the most of every single moment this world has to offer.

Lesson to book banners everywhere: if you tell me I shouldn't read a book because it has "pornographic" content, you have just guaranteed I will not only read it once, but will probably buy it, read it over and over, and then purchase copies for my friends. One, because book banning is stupid, and I'm a teenager, and therefore I like to do exactly the opposite of what you tell me to do. Two, because I'm a teenager, and pretty much a horndog, and secretly love "pornographic" content.

Belated awkward alert. *shuffles awkwardly*

Moving on; unlike Speak, I wasn't really sure what to expect from Twenty Boy Summer. Grief, friendship, and boys are fairly broad and vague themes, after all. But as I've said before, the unexpected books are the sweetest kind, and Twenty Boy Summer was no exception.

To me, it was a coming of age story; one in which we can watch the character move from childhood to the fringes of adulthood. Aforementioned grief, friendship, and boys were secondary to our character's journey. But - and this was the beautiful thing - I could also see an infinite number of other things other people could get out of it. To me, the mark of a truly great book is subtlety, and Twenty Boy Summer has it in spades.

Most subtle of all (and this, not supposedly pornographic content, is what I imagine so angered Wesley Scroggins in the first place) is its treatment of Anna's "albatross" - a.k.a., her virginity, and sex in general. My feelings on sex have always been the toughest ones for me to sort out internally, much less put into words, and Ockler's sweet yet very real take got me to thinking about a lot of things I hadn't thought about. The concept of sex and losing virginity is not an end-all be-all for Anna, it's simply an experience. An incredibly important one, but not a life-ending one. I thought that was an awesome and very honest way to look at it; I also think it's going to piss a lot of people off (and already has). So this book is worth reading for that discussion alone.

Also very nuanced and lovely is the relationship between Anna and Frankie, who seem in a lot of ways more like sisters than best friends. The uneasy knowledge that you should want the other person to do well, but that you also want to compete with them and win, was written into Anna's internal dialogue so well that I found myself cringing in been-there sympathy. Frequently.

In fact, the entire book felt like I was reading about myself. Not in the shattering, consuming sort of way that marks the books I'm truly obsessed about, but in the laid-back, quiet way that marks a book that will always have a beloved place on my shelf for those days I need to remind myself that life is, in the end, good, and worth living.

One of the best books I've read this year and worth every bit of media attention it got in Speaks Loudly. I can't wait to read more from Sarah Ockler! Five out of five stars.

Some Duluth fangrrling and Forever party MADNESS

In case you didn't notice, I broke my Monday through Friday blog-a-day pledge this week (actually, that pledge only LASTED one week). I do, however, have a legitimate excuse: family road trip to pick up some goats.

The glamorous life. Y'all know I live it.

The reason this is noteworthy news is that this road trip happened to take us right through Duluth, Minnesota, which in addition to being one of my favorite places on earth AND the place where my parents (mother-and-stepfather set) met when they were eighteen and seventeen, respectively, is also a location in the Wolves of Mercy Falls trilogy by Maggie Stiefvater. (Think awesome-and-unfortunately-fictional-candy-shop in Shiver. Think recording studio in Linger.)


In a bout of temporary insanity that may or may not have been brought on by the imminent release date of Forever, I decided it would be a fantastic idea to bring my lovely hardcover copies of both Shiver and Linger and have my mother take a picture.

Things you can see in this picture:  

1. Lake Superior and Duluth over my right shoulder,
2. some books, and
3. me being a fangrrl.

Things you can't see in this picture:

1. The natives (read: hipsters, emos, and yuppies) down the beach getting very annoyed at the one stupid tourist chick who wants her picture taken with some books,
2. my mother's face when she realized I was making her look like a tourist and ruining her Duluth street cred, and
3. actual tourists, because it was freaking freezing and so windy that it was hard to stand up straight and they were all sane enough to stay in their hotels or go tour the Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald exhibit or something.

What makes it worth it:  

1. The ARC of Forever that showed up in my mailbox this morning.

Life = made.

#YASaves: What I can't say in 140 characters

Unless you a) don't have a Twitter account or b) have been hiding under a rock for the past forty-eight hours or so, you know about the Wall Street Journal piece on YA that basically said that 95% of the genre is a dark conspiracy to sell books by ruining childhoods (and also probably killing some kittens). Apparently reading books about vampires, cutting, and gladiator-style fights to the death can turn kids into vampires, cutters, and gladiators that fight to the death. Who knew?

Also, funny. Isn't this the exact same argument we've heard about teens reading books that feature LGBTQ characters?

There are no words for the suck that is this article. And so, to make up for linking to it once here for those who haven't read it, I'm going to link an entirely gratuitous three times here to the really awesome thing it spawned: the #YAsaves hashtag. Check it here. Here. And here again. (Also it's satirical sister #YAkills.) YA tweeps? You freaking rock. There's only one problem with #YAsaves, and it's that the reasons YA saves me are way too complex for 140 characters. Or a blog post, for that matter, which is why this is forty-eight hours later than I wanted it to be. (Not to mention there are already too many fantastic posts on this topic to list, Read Now Sleep Later's linky has quite a few of the best of them.)

I'll start here: When I entered kindergarten, my teacher decided I was gifted. That I would no longer get recess with the other kids, or really any playtime at all. That I'd spend my time in the library with the fifth-grade level books a cranky librarian picked out for me. That I wouldn't be allowed to fidget, or talk. And that most of all, I wouldn't be allowed to let my "potential" go to waste.

No one ever tells you that "gifted" means a glass wall between you and the rest of the world.

Teachers fawned over me. Parents hated me. The other kids ignored me. One of the clearest memories I have of that year is a day they rearranged the bus schedule. I was late to get to my new bus, and of course, every window seat was already taken. No one - and I mean no one - would let me sit next to them, until the very back of the bus when my thirteen-year-old next-door neighbor took pity on me. I hated the bus. More than the bus, I hated the library. It was like a prison: the way it smelled, the fluorescent lights, the books stacked in front of me - books about dogs and cats and guinea pigs that talked, but never about real kids. Certainly never about gifted kids.

I don't remember leaving public school. My mom pulled me out two months in, and transferred me to private school, where things got slightly better. I had recess. And at least there were no more libraries. After my mother decided to homeschool me in first grade, I finally made lasting friends, and life improved immensely.

Only the glass wall stayed. Even with my very best friends I felt alone, like there was a language I'd never learned, or a secret handshake I'd never been taught. When we moved to Minnesota when I was ten, when I found out my parents were getting divorced at eleven, when I stopped going to church and started getting panic attacks at twelve, I started building a brick wall behind the glass one: I started believing that I would never feel comfortable in my own skin. That I would never have real friends, much less date. That I would never be welcome anywhere. That I would always be the "gifted" one, the "lucky" one; translation: outsider.

I had led a fantastically blessed, loved, and cared-for life, and yet by the time I was fourteen I was in so much emotional pain that I still get kind of dazed just thinking about it.

And that's where the Wall Street Journal article goes wrong: It assumes that the "good" kids don't know the dark. That pain isn't internal. That, with enough grooming (translation: control, and not just of YA), we'd have perfect kids. Reading (and writing) YA was my escape from my life as a "perfect" young woman, as Ms. Gurdon terms it in the article, the only place I wasn't forced into the box of miniature adult. YA was the only place I didn't have to worry about my manners or moral fiber. YA saved me by being the only place I didn't feel like I was being saved. By being dark and funny and light and deep and good and bad and real, the very qualities Megan Cox Gurdon condemns.

I started this blog when I was fourteen, in August of 2009, because I wanted to share that escape. Never in a million years could I have imagined stumbling upon a community as welcoming as YA's, one where the glass wall of "gifted" was not only ignored, but shattered. My last anxiety attack was almost three years ago. For the first time in my life, I feel comfortable in my own skin.

YA did that. And if Megan Cox Gurdon chooses not to see that, along with the hundreds (thousands?) of other stories much more heartbreaking and eloquent than mine, I honestly feel sorry for her.

Many apologies for my incoherence, and please keep sharing your stories in the comments. I've pretty much bawled my eyes out at every one so far.