Review: Invincible Summer

Title: Invincible Summer
Author: Hannah Moskowitz
Release Date: April 19, 2011
Publisher: Simon Pulse
Cover Designer: Cara E. Petrus
Age Audience: YA
Genre: Contemporary
Tagline: Some girls are addictive.
Summary: Noah’s happier than I’ve seen him in months. So I’d be an awful brother to get in the way of that. It’s not like I have some relationship with Melinda. It was just a kiss. Am I going to ruin Noah’s happiness because of a kiss?
Across four sun-kissed, drama-drenched summers at his family’s beach house, Chase is falling in love, falling in lust, and trying to keep his life from falling apart.

My Review:
The first thing I want to say is to NOT judge this book by its cover. It’s a great cover, but it doesn’t fit the book at all. The girl in a bikini lying on the beach gives the impression of a fluffy summer romance, which this book most definitely was not.

I heard about the Camus quoting before I started reading the book, and I thought it would bother me. But it didn’t. In fact, I really liked it, and now I’m curious to read more of Camus’ work. This could just be a personal view, but I didn’t think it was unusual for the teens to quote Camus in everyday speech at all. I saw it as no more abnormal than the way my family always quotes TV shows and movies.

The writing was so real and honest. There was a lot of heavy swearing, but I liked that! Teens swear in real life, so it would be short of the truth to not have them swear in fiction. I was so compelled that I was up until 3 a.m. reading this book. And unlike most of the time, I wasn’t reading because I couldn't sleep. I couldn't sleep because I was reading.

In the beginning, when you’re reading about a barbecue the McGills are having with their beach house neighbors, the Hathaways, everything about the scene and setting gives off such a happy and content feeling you know it’s going to become something you’ll look back on with nostalgia later in the book. The dialogue between Chase and his siblings made me laugh out loud at times because they sounded like conversations I would have with my siblings—though my family is nowhere near as dysfuctional as the McGill’s.

I really don’t know what more I can say about this book. Invincible Summer was not completely a happy story, but it was a realistic, beautiful and intense one that needed to be told.

★★★★½