Twenty Boy Summer - Sarah Ockler

All Hail the Elf, the Shelf Elf, that is. It was from her blog that I won a copy of this book. Yeah!

This is a great book, but for older readers. The main character is a girl, Anna, who had a secret romance with the brother of her best friend and then he died. He had told her that he wanted to tell his little sister, and she'd promised not to tell. But she didn't know he was going to die. So now she's stuck with this big secret and she's having trouble moving on. She's tired of pretending, but she can't face the idea of gong against his wishes. The best friend, Frankie, has been struggling, too, of course, with the death of her brother, and neither of them really knows how to navigate her way through.

The two girls go off to the beach for a vacation with Frankie's parents and hatch a plan to try and get twenty boys to pay attention to them. Thus begins both the unraveling and the way through for both Anna and Frankie.

It's a very well done romance/coming of age story, but it has some mature themes, so it's better for the high school library than the middle school