The Great Godden

It's a story of summer, a story of changes, a story of tensions, a story of relationships, a story of attractions, a story of growing up.

A family of four children and two parents spends every summer at the beach, and nearby is a cousin and her longtime boyfriend. This summer two young men join them, and that changes everything.

Meg Rosoff builds an atmosphere bone-wrenchingly candid about the teenage experience of alienation and confusion and agonizing learning, starting with a mysterious teen narrator whose name and gender are never specified, and adding hints of disconcerting behavior from most of the characters, and culminating in sharp shards of broken glass as relationships shatter.

The story is beautifully told, and the characters feel so true-to-life as to be painful to read.