Six More Months of June, by Daisy Garrison

Caplan and Mina have been next door neighbors and best friends through their school years.  Mina is shy and withdrawn, an outcast at school.  Caplan is popular and dating the school's Queen Bee Hollis.  But there has always been some sort of connection between Caplan and Mina that no one can explain (but people assume that it is some sort of crush).  But now, approaching the end of high school, Caplan is forced to face some uncomfortable truths about his feelings for Mina when she starts dating his best friend Quinn.  And as things explode emotionally around them and the curtain closes on their childhoods, a reckoning comes to all.

A beautifully written story that has all of the tropes but none of the expected endings.  The biggest surprise is Hollis who, far from being some uber-popular bitch, ends up being the nicest person of all.  Yet each of the other main characters (Caplan, Mina, and Quinn) manage to surprise with their independent non-stereotypical actions.  The book is littered with favorite scenes and fulls of brilliant quotes and one suspects that Garrison has spent her lifetime collecting favorite anecdotes to stuff into this first novel.

Anecdote packing, unfortunately, is also the weakness of the book.  For while the book is an exquisitely exposition upon the cusp of adulthood, it is bereft of an actual story.  The plot boils down to "four kids graduate and realize that they love each other in ways that transcend romantic or sexual feelings" and that's basically it.  You'll want to read it very slowly and carefully to suck out all the goodness, but in the end there isn't much substance here -- no deep meaning, no emotional climax -- just a sense of young people (through the author) making fantastic observations about life and growing up.