Book Review - How to say goodbye in robot

How did I miss this one?  Oh right, it was checked out from my library all the time back in the fall/early winter.  Not surprising, since it has a rad cover and, oh yeah, it name-checks robots.  This is exactly the kind of book I would have looooved as a teenager - a la Chbosky's The Perks of Being A Wallflower - which means that as an adult, I also pretty much loved it.  Mysterious depressed boy?  Check.  Teens with weird film interests (John Waters)?  Check.  Close friendship that's so intense it's more intense than a romance?  Check!

Natalie Standiford's literary YA debut (she also wrote The Dating Game series) had me from the very beginning:

"I turned a corner and came to a small church.  There was a headstone near the path leading to the church's wooden doors.  I stepped closer to read the headstone.  It said FOR THE UNICORN CHILD.  That is so cool, I thought.  What a funky town this was.  I imagined a neighborhood Legend of the Unicorn Child, about a one-horned little boy who'd died tragically, hit by a car or shot by a mugger or maybe poisoned by lawn pesticides.  The story of the Unicorn Child was so real to these people they'd erected a stone in his memory.  Then I read it again.  The stone didn't say FOR THE UNICORN CHILD.  It said FOR THE UNBORN CHILD" (p. 9).

Bea, the narrator, was just the right amount quirky.  Something about her and Ghost Boy's relationship/friendship, at least to me, conjured up Daniel Clowe's Ghost World.  But what I loved about this book was that it wasn't just quirky for the sake of being quirky.  It managed coming-of-age realizations, captured those senior year feeling so well, and squeezed in an interesting mystery too.

I don't know about anyone else out there (okay, I guess I do, since this book had several starred reviews and was a BBYA selection), but I can't wait to see what else Standiford has up her sleeve.