The Secret Year by Jennifer R Hubbard

• Reading level: Young Adult
  
• Hardcover: 192 pages
• Publisher: Viking Juvenile (January 7, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0670011533

Product Description from amazon

Take Romeo and Juliet. Add The Outsiders. Mix thoroughly.

Colt and Julia were secretly together for an entire year, and no one—not even Julia’s boyfriend— knew. They had nothing in common, with Julia in her country club world on Black Mountain and Colt from down on the flats, but it never mattered. Until Julia dies in a car accident, and Colt learns the price of secrecy. He can’t mourn Julia openly, and he’s tormented that he might have played a part in her death. When Julia’s journal ends up in his hands, Colt relives their year together at the same time that he’s desperately trying to forget her. But how do you get over someone who was never yours in the first place?

I fell in love with this book from the very beginning. It has a great voice and I loved that it was a love story, and not an overly sappy one, told from the boys point of view. Colt felt like a real boy to me the entire length of the novel. This is a great debut novel and it is definitely not to be missed.