Brielle asked Sarah Ockler:

I absolutely LOVE Twenty Boy Summer!!! How did you come up with the idea for it? Thanks :)

Sarah Ockler Hi Brielle! Thank you so much! I was inspired to write Twenty Boy Summer by my work with an organization that supports families whose loved ones have died and donated organs or tissues. Through their programs and events, I met so many teens who’d experienced the death of a sibling or friend, and their stories always stayed with me. When I started working on my first novel, I knew that I wanted to share a little bit of the love, loss, and hope I saw through their eyes.

I chose to do that by telling the story of two best friends struggling after the tragic and sudden death of someone they both loved very much. But I also wanted to show that life goes on, even when we don’t want it to — even when we don’t think it can. So in the book, while Anna and Frankie were trying to put their lives back together after the tragedy of losing Matt, they were also on summer vacation, which meant beaches, boys, makeup, best friend fights, sunsets, toes in the sand, and all of those every day things that keep going on around us, even when our hearts are broken. I just kept thinking about how those two things would come together — tragedy and life, heartbreak and hope, love and loss — and the story grew from there.

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