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)
