A & L Do Summer by Jan Blazanin

Summary:
There's not much to do in small town Cottonwood Creek, Iowa, which is something best friends Laurel and Aspen are learning the hard way. Laurel is the city slicker from Chicago, who Aspen becomes friends with during their junior year of high school. But when summer comes, the girls are afraid they will be sitting around working on their tan. Things take a hilarious turn when the town bullies set their sights on making Laurel and Aspen miserable, and the two girls find themselves in a heap of trouble, including a few run-ins with the police. Will the girls be able to survive the summer without a criminal record, and will they be able to pick up a few boys along the way?

Review:
So I decided to write my own summary because the one on the back of the book and the one on GoodReads are really short and don't really explain the book that well. The synopsis on the back of my book actually makes is sound like Laurel will be the narrator, but it's actually Aspen. Regardless of the slight confusion I felt at the beginning, I still really enjoyed A & L Do Summer and think it's the perfect summer read.

Laurel and Aspen have a great relationship, which I liked reading about. Laurel is the one who wants to be popular so she comes up with all these crazy schemes to achieve notoriety in their small town. Aspen is the more rational one, but she goes along with Laurel's ideas because she really wants to do something adventurous. The two are convinced that they are going to have a boring summer, but what is hilarious is that these two girls get into so many shenanigans it's unbelievable. Most of their problems stem from these three bullies that attend their high school. For seemingly no apparent reason, they have targeted Laurel and Aspen. I thought it was a tad unrealistic that these boys would pick on and threaten Laurel and Aspen, but since it's such an important part of the story I just let it go.

What was also funny is that Laurel and Aspen get picked up by the police a few times and their parents have to get them at the station. Laurel and Aspen seem like such a good girls that it was almost comical to have them sitting in the station like criminals. Some of the times it wasn't actually their fault (they were covering for the bullies) but other times it was.

Laurel and Aspen were such a joy to read about. They were funny and definitely got themselves into some trouble, but you could tell that the girls were such good friends and would always be there for each other. There were also some cute boys in this story, making A & L Do Summer a great summer read.

Rating: 8 out of 10.
FTC: received from publisher
Release Date: May 10, 2011

2011/Egmont/288 pages.