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Searching... McMinnville Public Library | Horner, E. | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
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.
Author Notes
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.
Reviews (5)
School Library Journal Review
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 (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Horn Book Review
Devastated by her best friend Julia's death, seventeen-year-old Cass worries that her remaining friends will desert her: they are all flamboyant, emotive theater people, while Cass is a reserved math nerd. The friends' decision to produce a musical theater script Julia had been writing gives Cass purpose and direction...until Heather, her middle-school nemesis, is cast in the lead role. So Cass takes off on a cross-country bike trip, trying to honor another of Julia's dreams; later, back home, she struggles to mend fences with Heather so the show can go on. The novel shuttles back and forth between two timelines: that of Cass's initial grieving process and cross-country journey of self-discovery; and that of her later reconciliation with her friends and wary romance with Heather. Cass is both unique (her Quaker upbringing and practical self-sufficiency make the bike trip credible) and very relatable (her disconnection from her friends and in-progress identity will feel familiar to many readers, and not just the gay ones). Horner manages to treat the grieving process with respect while maintaining a positive tone, a balance that allows the triumphant conclusions of both story lines to feel unforced. With its John Green-esque set pieces, mad road trips, fortuitous stranger encounters, thoroughly teased-out friendship drama, and optimistic romanticism-not to mention a fresh treatment of a lesbian heroine-this entertaining debut has something for everyone. From HORN BOOK, (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
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. Cassnever quite one of the group and unable to cope with Heather's starring role in Totally Sweet Ninja Death Squadsets 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) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Sixteen-year-old Cass Meyer's best friend, Julia, is killed in a car accident, leaving behind a special project: an original musical entitled Totally Sweet Ninja Death Squad. Cass' grief is complicated by her never-stated and unrequited crush on Julia, and the fact that popular and pretty Heather Graham, who teased Cass mercilessly in middle school by calling her dyke, gets the lead in Julia's play. Horner cleverly separates the action into two parallel plots one occurring during Cass' summer solo bike ride from Illinois to California with Julia's ashes, the other during senior year and the push to stage the musical. Cass is a fascinating and believable character, a Quaker and committed cyclist incredibly competent in matters mechanical and awkwardly inept in matters of the heart. When Heather comes out to Cass and initiates a relationship, it rings true to have the most homophobic person be gay herself. As in John Green's Looking for Alaska (2005) and Nina LaCour's Hold Still (2009), Horner sensitively explores the hole left behind when we lose someone, and the slow emergence from grief that follows.--Carton, Debbie Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
DANCE: 10. Looks: 3. What is adolescence but a long, grueling theatrical audition? The cruel spotlight and the snickering from the darkness might as well describe the morning walk to the locker through a gantlet of rich kids, bullies and fabulous, distant beauties. This is one reason the authors of two new gay-themed young adult books center their plots on the production of a high school musical. The other is that "gay" and "musical" tend to exert a worldbending magnetic force on each other. Cass Meyer, the heroine of Emily Horner's ambitious first novel, "A Love Story Starring My Dead Best Friend," is a short-haired, athletic, math-loving high school senior whose schoolmates long ago reached a consensus about her sexuality. Cass herself isn't so sure. She's never felt passionately attracted to either sex. When other girls fawn over their crushes, she just doesn't get it. But what about Julia, the sun around which she orbited from early childhood? "I had never let myself think about that too long, or too deeply," Cass observes. "Except that there was a time I wanted to hold her hand, and didn't, because I couldn't risk someone thinking it meant something. I couldn't risk that it might mean something." Julia had been her hero - laughing off or playing up to innuendos about her sexuality, always making time for Cass even after falling in love with Ollie, a theater geek. Suddenly, she's gone - killed in a one-car crash on a rainy night. Cass decides to help Ollie and their other friends memorialize her by staging Julia's "sekrit project," a gore-spattered musical called "Totally Sweet Ninja Death Squad." The lead? Heather Galloway, Cass's middle school nemesis: the bully who started the gay rumors about Cass and made her life hell. "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? BY contrast, John Green and David Levithan's "Will Grayson, Will Grayson" is a complete romp. Written in alternating chapters (Green's are the odd-numbered ones), it builds toward the random meeting of two teenagers named Will Grayson. One is a gay misanthrope who thinks he's found his soul mate on the Internet, and the other is the nebbishy straight best friend of Tiny Cooper, a giant in every sense of the term: a 6-foot-6 football player, out and proud since the fifth grade, and the star of his own enormous life. This isn't your mother's gay Y.A. novel. Tiny Cooper feels not a moment of shame or alienation. When yet another boyfriend breaks up with him - by phone, by text, by Facebook status - he weeps publicly. He's writing a musical about his life called "Hold Me Closer," in which his best friend figures as "Phil Wrayson" and all 18 exboyfriends are depicted onstage. High school teasing bounces off Tiny like rays of soft, flattering sunlight, and he always has a clever comeback. "Maybe that works for Tiny," Will reflects, "but it never works for me. Shutting up works. Following the rules works." When classmates ask how it feels to have sex with Tiny Cooper, Will just shuts up and keeps walking. Once, he wrote a letter to the school newspaper in defense of Tiny's right to be both super-gay and on the football team. "I don't regret writing the letter in the least, but I regret signing it." Despite its structure, which shuttles between one Will and the other, the novel is so tightly woven that it begins to feel miraculous. Neither Will can hold a candle to Tiny Cooper - which, luckily, both of them realize near the end. They let themselves be lifted temporarily by this flaming Falstaff and then find a way to show Tiny he is appreciated. "Will Grayson, Will Grayson" is so funny, rude and original that by the time flowers hit the stage after "Hold Me Closer," even the musical-averse will cheer. Regina Marler is the editor of "Queer Beats: How the Beats Turned America On to Sex."