4.5 stars

There's a lot of excellent Young Adult fiction being written at the moment. This is one of them - quirky, funny, and honest.

It's about love, not uncommon in YA literature. It's about awkward teenagers. It's about losing your virginity. So a bit of American Pie mixed with Richard Curtis.

Lobsters mate for life (supposedly). Hannah is desperate to meet hers, but is willing to lose her virginity before university to have it out of the way. But then at a party, she meets a shy, sweet boy in the bathroom. And they hit it off. But she doesn't know his name. Sam can't talk to girls, not without a game plan of the conversation planned out beforehand. So when he meets a pretty girl in the bathroom at a party and has no trouble talking to her, he instantly feels something strong.

The dual narrative continues like this, with overlapping stories (and phrases repeated) from one chapter to another, connecting Hannah and Sam in the story, even when they take a while to meet again in their lives on the page.

They are both lovely people, nicely drawn, with the usual teenage failings and dramas - sometimes you want to bang their heads together - but you don't want to stop reading. Their romantic misadventures take them to a music festival, post-exam holidays all the way back to their friends' bedrooms in the summer after A-Levels as they await their exam results and the envelope that will give them a direction to take the rest of their lives.

For anyone who's taken exams and been through this, it's a good reminder of what it felt like, when the world was still so full of choices, and no door was yet closed. It's nice to see this set in the UK too, less common than American teen stories, though setting didn't really feel particularly British.

I'd be interested to know how the two authors collaborated on this together - did one take the female narrative, and the other the male?

Really enjoyable if you want a quirky trip with two loveable teens through a summer of luurve.