There will never be another John Hughes movie. I am incredibly sad about this. However, books like this one – heirs to John Hughes’ oeuvre in all of the very best ways – go a long way toward alleviating some of that sadness.

This book may have the best title of any on the fall list. It’s just darn catchy. Very memorable. I like the cover, too – I wish it were another bright color, because this book is really not a romance, but I’m honestly so grateful that it doesn’t have a girl’s face on it that I’m going to embrace the pink. (Actually, there aren’t as many teen girl novels printed with pink covers as you’d think there were. And of those with pink covers, there are very, very few – if any – that are this good.)

Not only does it have the best title on the fall list, but it’s hands down one of my favorite fall books.

Bea’s father, a professor, accepts a new position at Johns Hopkins. This means that her family is moving from Ithaca, New York to Baltimore just in time for Bea to begin her senior year at a small private school where everyone, no doubt, had met in utero. She is not really looking forward to this, but is reacting to it and to the sudden weirdness in her parents’ marriage with a fair amount of stoicism.

The book opens with a fantastically odd scene where her mother discovers a gerbil trying to chew its way through their patio furniture right before they move. Her mother seems overly eager for Bea to embrace the gerbil (who Bea names Goebbels) as a new member of the family, and is distraught when it is found dead just a few hours later. When Bea does not share her distress, her mother tells her You’re not a girl. You’re a robot! Bea isn’t bothered by this so much as she is bothered by the way her mother has been behaving. They’d moved lots of times, but this particular move seems to be the straw that’s broken her mother’s back.

When Bea arrives at school the next morning, the girl (Anne) two seats away in Assembly is happy to see her. Finally I have a buffer between me and Ghost Boy, Anne says. She explains that Ghost Boy is Jonah, who’s gone to school with her forever. In seventh grade someone started a rumor that he was dead, and when he showed up for school, the nickname sprang into use and never really went away. Jonah seems like a ghost of sorts to Bea – he speaks little, has no friends, sits alone at lunch.

And yet Bea is drawn to him in a way she can’t explain.

To the bafflement of Anne and the other girls she gets to know, Bea and Jonah embark on one of THOSE friendships. The ones that start all of a sudden, usually in an odd sort of way (perhaps laced with some sarcastic or wry opening comments), gather strength quickly, and often implode. Usually more than once. Bea and Jonah begin when he tips her off to a late night radio show; when she listens, she learns that he is a regular caller. The world of this radio show becomes the first thing to bind them together and a thread that weaves through the rest of the book. As they learn more about one another – Jonah had a mentally handicapped twin who was killed in a car accident along with their mother; Bea’s mother seems to be truly going off the deep end, becoming obsessed with chickens and falling over everything in sight -  they become closer. And then one night Jonah shares a secret with Bea – a secret that will bring them together and push them apart, cause them to both love and hate one another, and, ultimately, decide their future.

I love the quirky yet intimate tone of Standiford’s writing. She lets Bea let you in in some very interesting ways. One of my first occurs very early in the book. The night before school starts, Bea is suffering from insomnia, and deprived of the late night radio show she would listen to in Ithaca, begins instead to imagine herself dead. As a way to try to fall asleep. (This book just gets more awesome as it goes along. Who finds death soothing? Awesome Bea, that’s who.)

I used lots of different death scenarios. There was the classic funeral scene: lying in my open coffin, dead but more beautiful than I ever looked in life, like Snow White in her crystal bier. Everyone I knew would pass by to gaze at me and cry. They should have appreciated me while I was alive. The world as they knew it will never be the same.

The last mourner was always a boy, whatever boy I had a crush on at the time. He’d be a wreck, totally destroyed by my death. When he saw me in my coffin, he’d suddenly realize that he’d loved me all along. The other kids in school, the fools who had ignored me all year, were wrong, so very wrong. The injustice of it would overwhelm Crush Boy, who’d run into the street and throw himself in front of a truck.

It was all very satisfying.

And Jonah…Jonah is the kind of character who seems like he’s going to be a caricature before he even appears on the scene, thanks to how others view him. It is almost immediately obvious, however, that he is not. Standiford peels back Jonah’s layers like an onion, and (just to continue the metaphor) with each subsequent layer Jonah becomes more insubstantial – but also, to Bea, more transparent. Their relationship feels so much more real than a lot of friendships in novels do. For me it was at times a little too real.

I had a Jonah once. His name was Chris. Unfortunately he’s gone now – the world ultimately ended up being too much for him to bear. But the oddness and the fierceness and the insight and the wit that he brought into my life have stayed with me. Jonah reminded me of Chris, and for that I am especially grateful that I read this book. But anyone who’s ever had a Jonah knows that Jonahs can be hard to love and that Jonahs can hurt you deeply. Bea learns both of these things very quickly, but she also learns that the deepest friendships – the ones where you are so open that you allow yourself to be hurt – are the friendships that change you forever.

I want more, more, more from this author.

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