Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead

This is definitely a book to read in the summer.  Sag Harbor is a town on Long Island known for a large African-American summer community.  This book is about one particular summer when Benji (the main character) is 14.  His twin brother and he spend the summer there among their friends and summer jobs and occassionally their parents. 

This book has very little plot.  It's a very rich description of Benji's summer on Sag Harbor - a perfect depiction of a specific time and place and point in someone's life.  During most of the book I felt like I was one of Benji's friends, just running around the town with him and his crew.  The drama of a 14-year old's minutiae was at the center of each chapter - who makes the best waffle cones at work, who is on whose BB-gunfight team, who is going to walk to the beach because the car doesn't seat the whole gang.  And some serious content around his parents' imperfect marriage and his older sister's chosen isolation from the family.  Each chapter seemed to be able to stand alone as a short story - about half-way through I figured out that there was no overarching storyline other than "what happened this summer" so I could enjoy each chapter on its own.

The other thing about the book that I liked was that it depicted life among African-American teens in the 1980's in New York very well.  The division between middle-class and "street" communities, the music, clothes, hairstyles, foods, lots of details of Benji's life both in Sag Harbor and in NYC, where he lived, were described.

I liked this book.  It transported me to Benji's world and showed me a community I didn't know anything about.  Well-written and nicely executed.