Summer Lovin...

So I thought before summer officially ends I would read The Summer I Turned Pretty, which I half-remembered from a review of its sequel, It's Not Summer Without You (which I haven't read, but put on hold at the library). I spotted it on the library shelf a couple weeks ago and wanted to finish it before summer's end. Well I finished it in one day, pretty much. About fifty pages in I put it on my goodreads.com shelf and quickly scanned a few reviews. Now that I've finished it, I am pretty confused by what a few of the readers had to say about Summer. First there was the comment that the main character, fifteen/sixteen year old Belly, is unlikable and spoiled. The reviewer had all kinds of bad things to say about her. All I can think is that there's no way in heck the reviewer ever met Margaret Simon in the pages of a book, or in a nightmare, for that matter. Belly (Isabel) is a normal teenage girl who is pretty self-aware when it comes to her equally normal shortcomings. Another criticism of the book was that it didn't seem to be "about anything". Which is also way out there.The book is about young love, first love, sibling rivalry, and loss.The folks who ripped on this book probably have never been in love or something. I also don't know how they could have experienced great loss and not really felt something for this book. Dare I say that I was almost brought to tears near the end? Yes. I will say it. I never read Jenny Han before but I've seen Shug around and will probably read that after the sequel to this one. Excellent book, for summer or anytime. This was more than a beach read, though. And I was surprised to see that the cover has a quote from Sarah Dessen on it that reads, "This book has what every girl wants in a summer." Indeed, it has a ton of things in it that every girl wants to experience. But it has a couple things, that every girl probably will experience, but will hurt to the core. Great, great book.