A Love Story Starring My Dead Best Friend

by Emily Horner

Overview

For months, Cass has heard her best friend, Julia, whisper about a secret project. When Julia dies in a car accident, her drama friends decide to bring the project?a musical called Totally Sweet Ninja Death Squad?to fruition. But Cass isn't a drama person. She can't take a summer of painting sets, and she won't spend long hours with Heather, the girl who made her miserable all through middle school and has somehow landed the leading role. So Cass takes off. In alternating chapters, she spends the first part of summer on a cross-country bike trip and the rest swallowing her pride, making props, and?of all things?falling for Heather.

This is a story of the breadth of love. Of the depth of friendship. And of the most hilarious musical one quiet suburb has ever seen.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781101427491
Publisher:	Penguin Young Readers Group
Publication date:	06/10/2010
Sold by:	Penguin Group
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
File size:	426 KB
Age Range:	14 - 17 Years

About the Author

Emily Horner is originally from Montreal, Quebec. A fan of Japanese pop culture—including ninjas, of course—she is currently a librarian in Brooklyn, New York.

Editorial Reviews

A Love Story alternately pursues two narrative tracks— the present day, in which Cass negotiates her painful relationships with Ollie and Heather, and the recent past, in which she attempted a solo bicycle trip from Chicago to California with Julia's ashes, planning to scatter them in the ocean. Sometimes these two stories don't align, and breakthroughs in the past are followed by disorienting returns to the same issues in the present. A budding romance with Heather is not always convincing, either. But the strength of this promising novel is its emotional reach, from mourning through identity crisis through new love. Cass's grief colors everything, and the grief itself is tinged always with that question she never let herself ask: Was she in love with Julia?
—The New York Times

Regina Marler

This entertaining debut has something for everyone.

Horn Book

Horner sensitively explores the hole left behind when we lose someone, and the slow emergence from grief that follows.

Booklist

Gr 8 Up—After the death of her best friend, Cass finds herself questioning her own identity, sexuality, and place in the high school hierarchy. Before she died, Julia had been working on a top-secret project: a musical called Totally Sweet Ninja Death Squad. Now that she is gone, her boyfriend, Oliver, and her other theater friends are determined to stage the show as a tribute. Cass is committed to helping backstage, building spectacular traps and weapons—until Heather, Cass's middle school nemesis, is cast as the female lead. Heather was the first person to tease Cass about her close friendship with Julia and suggest that Cass wanted it to be something more, and since Julia's death, Oliver has been making barbed remarks, as well. In the face of these complications, Cass sets off on a quest of her own: biking cross-country to take Julia's ashes to California. She tells herself that she is not running away from Oliver's hostility, Julia's friends' cold shoulders, or Heather's disconcerting new niceness. The journey helps her discover things she never knew about herself, and when she finds herself at rock bottom, she learns that Julia's friends are her friends, too. This funny, touching, and sweet coming-of-age story explores serious themes in a fresh way. Cass's tentative questioning of her own sexuality and her hesitant approach toward her first serious romantic relationship will delight readers who struggle with similar issues, as well as those who simply enjoy a well-crafted story.—Misti Tidman, Boyd County Public Library, Ashland, KY

School Library Journal

Cass doesn't really think a cross-country bike trip will make her best friend Julia any less dead, but it will get her away from reformed bully Heather, who tormented Julia all through middle school. After Julia's accidental death, her theater-geek friends, led by Julia's boyfriend, determine to perform the musical Julia had left in draft form. Cass-never quite one of the group and unable to cope with Heather's starring role in Totally Sweet Ninja Death Squad-sets off bicycling from Illinois to California. That adventure, complete with first kiss, first significant other and the heartbreaking loyalties of friendship, is beautifully interwoven with the tale of what comes after her return to Illinois: Cass's budding romance with Heather. More than a love story, this is a tale of survivors coping with the death of a friend, a girlfriend and the glue that held them all together. Bittersweet but never mawkish and punctuated with just the right amount of teen hipster humor. "Ninjas can divide by zero," the cast sings while flinging food-coloring-and-corn-syrup blood at the audience, and both Cass and readers laugh through tears. (Fiction. 12-16)

Kirkus Reviews