I am looking for a book that I read in my highschool library, so I think it’s YA. It was a thin book (probably more or less 100 pages) with a beige cover, and it had a introduction/foreword that said that the book was an extremely popular coming of age novel in France but it wasn’t as much in English, even though it was originally written in English. It’s about a 10~12 year old boy falling in love with a girl and having sex with her in the meadows, but he is institutionalized when her parents find out. Neither of them understand what sex is. I think there was a scene where he writes to the girl on the padded walls of the solitary ward but I’m not sure.
Lost Classics of Teen Lit: Name That Book! 