Book Review: A Love Story Starring My Dead Best Friend by Emily Horner

Librarian Emily Horner's debut novel is one of the strongest of the year, IMHO.  A Love Story Starring My Dead Best Friend is definitely a love story, but it's also a story about coming-of-age, about realizing your own identity, about realizing you are gay, and about a really kickass musical about ninjas that can divide by zero.  In the aftermath of her best friend Julia's death, Cass is at a loss.  She's always defined herself in relation to Julia.  Julia was her closest friend but she was also her main connection to her other friends.  They were all Julia's friends first, the theater nerds.  Does she belong with them?

This story features two plot-lines, Then and Now.  Now, Cass and her friends are turning Julia's secret project, her script for a musical about a ninjas, into reality.  Then is the past summer, when Cass decided to bike from Chicago to California, to bring Julia's ashes to the beach, to the West Coast, a place Julia never got to visit.  Both plot lines are equally compelling and would have sustained an excellent story, but what takes center stage, for this reader, is Cass coming into her own as a lesbian.  She struggles with trying to figure out if she ever loved Julia that way, and if she did, why she didn't tell her.  As her feelings change for her former enemy, Heather, she wishes Julia could have been there to sound her out.

This story is so skillfully realized by Emily Horner, with remarkable writing and keen sense of teenagers today.  This is absolutely the kind of book that so easily transcends "liked it" and becomes a favorite, the kind you clutch to your chest.  Highly recommended reading.