Coming of Age Actually Done Right
Yes, I know. It’s been absolute ages since I’ve updated this thing at all. Bad on me. Seriously, that wasn’t sarcasm. I hit a bit of a new book funk and was mostly continuing series’ that I’ve already gone over the first volume of on here, and I’m not going to cover anything but the first book of a series here to avoid spoilers as much as possible. But, enough about me, I’m back with a vengeance. That’s really all I need to say on that.
Friday I picked up a new book from Books-A-Million without realizing it had hardly been out over a week. For once it was a book that caught my attention that had absolutely nothing to do with the supernatural in any way. And the book in question is A Love Story Starring My Dead Best Friend by Emily Horner. And here is what the jacket says.
“For months Cass Meyer has heard her best friend, Julia, a wannabe Broadway composer, whispering about a top-secret project. Then Julia is killed in a car accident, and Julia’s drama friends make it their mission to bring the project–a musical entitled TOTALLY SWEET NINJA DEATH SQUAD–to fruition.
But Cass isn’t one of the drama people. She can’t take a summer of swallowing her pride and painting sets, and she won’t spend long hours with Heather Galloway, the girl who rudely questioned Cass’s sexuality all through middle school and who has somehow landed the starring role.
So Cass decides to follow her original plan for a cross-country road trip with Julia. Even if she has a touring bicycle instead of a driver’s license, and even if Julia’s ashes are coming along in Tupperware. When Cass returns late in August she’s not the same person–and neither, she discovers, is Heather. In fact, it’s hard to tell what will happen to the play when they start falling for each other…
This is a story about friendship. About love. About traveling a thousand miles just to find yourself. And it’s a story about the craziest high school musical one quiet suburb has ever seen.”
That’s right, Cass and Heather. I know that has the potential to be a touchy subject for many people for various reasons, least of all it being a Young Adult book, but the story felt amazingly honest to me. And in all honesty (clearly I’m not a professional writer, using variations of the same word twice within as many sentences) I found some of the THEN chapters incredibly hard to read due to losing a friend to a car accident when I was in high school as well. It wasn’t a friend that I was as close to as Julia was to Cass, but it was still something that I could relate to.
Speaking of THEN chapters, even the way the book was laid out drew me in. It alternates between chapters marked NOW–after Cass’s return to her hometown–and THEN–everything between Julia’s death and Cass’s return. And her THEN story wasn’t spoiled by the NOW thing as so many authors may have ended up accidentally doing.
All in all, I highly recommend this book. I was just expecting a quick fluffy read when I chose it, amused by the possibility of a love story between two girls in a Young Adult book, but I got so much more than I expected with it. I honestly couldn’t put it down.
