Review #81: The Summer I Found You, by Jolene Perry

This is a pretty formulaic boy-meets-girl YA romance, but with a couple of wrenches thrown in the mix. Kate is a high school senior, and she's just broken up with her boyfriend. She's also dealing with having been recently diagnosed with Type I diabetes, and, while I admittedly don't know a thing about that, even I could tell Kate wasn't on board with her treatment and/or watching her blood sugar. Aiden is Kate's friend's cousin, recently home from Afghanistan after losing his arm, and living at Kate's friend's house until he can figure out what to do with his life.

Of course, Kate and Aiden fall in love in the way that only two teenagers can. They both manage to screw it up, but they eventually manage to get it together. I found myself drawn more to Aiden than Kate, though, and felt like Kate wasn't quite worth the trouble. She was pretty immature, especially concerning her illness. The diabetes diagnoses was pretty serious - Kate passed out a couple of times and managed to get herself in to a diabetic coma at one point - and up until the very end, she chose to completely ignore the situation.

I think this is one of those angsty-teen romances that kind of got mushed in with that genre I'm really not liking known as New Adult. At least this male lead doesn't seem so smelly. But he's still painted as a pretty broken kid, and it makes me nervous that we're teaching young girls that broken boys can be "fixed" if only they love them enough. Aiden was a good person at heart, but his war injuries - both internal and external - are more than a seventeen-year-old girl can fix, no matter how much she loves him.