Twenty Boy Summer by Sarah Ockler- ALA Banned and Challenged Book

A year after the death of best friend, and possibly new lover, Matt, Anna ventures to Zanzibar with Frankie and her parents for their annual family holiday. The ghost of Matt follows them everywhere: the upstairs room where Matt used to sleep for the annual pilgrimage, sea glass that hides in sand, mementos hidden in closets.

It is the summer of healing, the summer of friendship, and the summer of 20 boys to lose oneself in.

At least, that is how I would have liked to have felt about this book. Twenty Boy Summer feels and reads like a first book that wasn't quite finished with the editing process. I can see where Sarah Ockler wanted to share a long-time friendship between siblings Matt and Frankie with their neighbour Anna. Anna and Matt just started feeling out what they mean to one another, keeping it form Frankie, hoping to break their possible coupling as painless as possible. The week before Matt is to approach his sister, he dies, leaving Anna to feel she needs to hold onto him and his secret, keeping Frankie in the dark to help her cope with the loss of her brother.

A year goes by, Frankie glams up, makes out with random boys at parties, and forces her best friend into the ultimatum that she WILL lose her virginity (also called Anna's Albatross.) At times, I feel that Anna is a well-rounded teenager pining over a romance she feels she missed out on. Other times, I feel she is just a dumb kid that can't say "no" to a friend that uses and belittles her.

Frankie is another story. She lies, cheats, steals, and belittles. I couldn't believe her character, her hurt or the way her family unit worked.

I felt this book was a bore. I also felt that the characters were flat and untrustworthy. I didn't know how one or the other were, neither were solid. The secondary character, Sam, was the only character I felt was an actual teenager that I could run into on the street.

I think Ockler missed out on trying to show how two best friends get over the grief of losing a loved one.

I would recommend to a low-level reluctant reader. 

Challenged in Missouri because the book is "soft-pornography" and "glorifies drinking, cursing, and premarital sex" in 2010.