The Next Door Boys is about a girl named Leigh who, coming off a year of cancer and the resulting treatments, escapes her parents' overly protective home to attend college and find her independence again.
Leigh struggles with the same things we all did at that age: finding our own self, transitioning from child to adult, learning that as much as we want to stand on our own, it's okay to need others. But she does it with the perspective of someone who has touched death, giving this book a sense of depth unlike so many other young adult books I've read.
Jolene does a fabulous job with characters. They feel entirely real and fully dimensional... there's not a flat cardboard character in this book, which is chock full of characters. especially Leigh, who wants her independence and normal life back so much that she puts her own health in peril. There are a lot of nice people in this book, which is, frankly, refreshing. The fact is, nice people can add complexities to a situation as well, and Jolene's cast of characters bring their own well-intentioned but nevertheless frustrating roadblocks to Leigh's desire for a normal life. Besides her own housemates, Leigh has to contend with the "next door boys": her watchful older brother, a handful of boys with crushes on her, and a tattoo-laden guy with a past and the secrets that go with it.
I liked that faith was also an integral part of Leigh's story. I think faith is important to a lot more people than books tend to show, and Jolene manages to make Leigh's faith so seamlessly a part of this story that it doesn't feel like an added element, but rather one the story could never have been written without. In fact, the importance of family in the LDS church plays a huge role in how Leigh sees herself and her future, knowing the cancer has robbed her of the ability to have children.
This book is both fun and heart-wrenching, and impossible to put down. While I would say it was an easy read in the fact that I fairly flew through the pages, it was also definitely thought provoking, and the kind of book that stays with you long after you finish. And as a young adult book, I was thrilled it had no language or sexual content that would keep me from giving this to my kids to read.
I highly recommend this book, and any other book Jolene writes. I, for one, will be the first in line for the next one!
