Emotions run high in Sarah Ockler's first novel, 'Twenty Boy Summer'
Tragedy darkens girls’ summer
Sarah Ockler spent her 15th summer competing with her best friend during a vacation trip to see who could kiss the most boys.
“At the end of the summer, we tallied it up and I had 20, she had 17. It became known as my summer of 20 boys,” laughed Ockler, now 33, during an interview in the North Buffalo home she shares with husband, Alex.
That experience inspired the catchy title of “Twenty Boy Summer,” Ockler’s beach-friendly but poignant first novel —geared for teens 14 and up—just out from Little Brown ($16.99).
Anna and Frankie are 16-year-old next-door neighbors and best friends competing with each other for a summer fling during a family vacation to California. But their contest has heartbreak at its core: both girls are in mourning for Frankie’s older brother, Matt, whose unexpected death has rocked their world.
Inspiration for this tragic backdrop came from Ockler’s experience working in New York City for the National Kidney Foundation’s National Donor Family Council with families who had lost loved ones. She had a personal interest in the work; her younger brother Scott Ockler, now a healthy 25 years old, underwent a liver transplant when he was 4 years old.
She saw the work as “kind of a way to thank the donor family that my family never got to meet.” Through the donor council, Ockler met “a lot of teens who had lost a brother or sister or friend. They really stuck with me. They had overcome something, had gone through something so tragic. I wanted to share that story,” she said.
Much of “Twenty Boy Summer” takes place at fictional Zanzibar Bay in California where Anna falls for a surfer named Sam.
“I wanted to convey that as hard as something is and how horrible as things happen, life goes on even when we don’t want it to,” Ockler says. “For these two teens in the book who are struggling with the death of their brother and their friend, they’re still teenagers, they’re still on summer vacation, still trying to come to terms with their changing friendship, and their sexuality, with boys and crushes and clothes and all the things that teen girls deal with.”
She gave her brother a cameo in the book as drummer “Scotty O” of the band Helicopter Pilot, which is Frankie and Anna’s favorite band. She says Helicopter Pilot played at area bars and weddings but “broke up right before the book came out.”
“Twenty Boy Summer” could be considered Ockler’s second book. As a first-grader at Union Pleasant Elementary in Hamburg, she printed and drew illustrations for an impressively long “abridged, condensed version” of “E. T.,” after seeing the movie.
A graduate of the University at Buffalo, she is currently working on revisions to her second YA novel for Little Brown, “Fixing Delilah Hannaford.”
She also spends lots of time online networking with other Young Adult authors and readers and promoting her novel through an ever-expanding network of YA bloggers. She had a Twitter launch party plus a trivia quiz and a scavenger hunt at www.sarahockler.com for “Twenty Boy Summer.” She also uses MySpace and Facebook. “I can put my personality out there, teens can get to know me as a person, connect with stories that I tell,” she said. Her Web site includes videos and a “Flip It Friday” feature focusing on a different YA blogger each week. “It’s time-consuming, but fun,” she says.
She connected online with the 2009 Debutantes, a group of YA and middle grade debut authors.
“Through that group, we’ve all exchanged ARCs [advance reading copies]. We sign up to read one another’s books, writing in them like yearbooks. That has been amazing.”
One of the most rewarding aspects of being a published author so far has been hearing from readers, she says. “Just a random teen who doesn’t blog, I get an e-mail saying I’ve struggled with this sort of loss and reading about this has helped me, thank you for writing this book. Even if I just get one e-mail like that, what a rewarding thing.”
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