Michelle Dalton

Sixteen-year-old Anna falls for Will, a New Yorker visiting her resort island for the summer, but she isn't sure if one summer of love will be worth her heart breaking when he leaves at the end of August.

Sixteenth Summer

Sofie

This book fully deserves a one star rating.

First, I found it very bland. Books of a similar caliber, like the Summer Boys series by Hailey Abbott and The Summer of Skinny Dipping by Amanda Howells, told a story. There were aspects readers got to consider, take in, understand. Not only do the characters have their typical summer loves, but they have things going on at home; fighting parents, complicated sibling relationships, etc. 

However, I found that in this book, there was nothing but the summer love. Very shortly after seeing Will, Anna was already becoming, for lack of a better word, obsessed with him. We never saw anything other than her and Will. I get it, it's the focal point of the story. But creating an entire book based on the oh-so-cliche "local falls for tourist and they have to cope with goodbye" love story, was just boring, uninteresting, and downright frustrating. 

I found Anna's character clingy. Very clingy. The entire summer, she's obsessing about this guy she barely knows. She goes on one date with him, already claiming she's "falling for the first time", she "couldn't wait for more", and by the end of the summer, she'd spewed out the L word, crying over her first love, her world falling apart. She was immature, naive, ignorant, and not a likeable character at all.

Believe you me, I tried my very best to give this book a fair shot. I even finished it, though I didn't want to. I have nothing else to say about this novel. It was most definitely not worth the read.

Sixteenth Summer

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