Cassie Was Here (review)

It's been a difficult move for eleven-year-old Bree; she has therefore, much to the dismay of her family, taken up again with her imaginary friend, Joey, and her consequent silliness results in the breaking of her older brother's arm and his ensuing inability to attend basketball camp. Into this dreary and lonely summer comes glamorous thirteen-year-old Cassie, who offers to be Bree's "neighborhood guide" but leads her not just around the neighborhood but into daring older-girl ways. The aspirational element of a preteen girl's attachment to a teenager is effectively explored here, and Cassie, with her mild raciness (she encourages Bree to try smoking, she sneaks into the empty school building, and she makes out with Bree's older brother), is perfect as a harbinger of adolescence and an ironic reminder that Bree's imaginary friend may be less trouble. Cassie is somewhat ambiguous and inconsistent as a character, however, in that the book seems to want to suggest she's more troubled than her behavior really indicates, and her final kind gesture to Bree of providing a connection to a new friend comes largely out of nowhere; the Joey issue also never quite partners with the Cassie story. This will still speak to youngsters, especially girls, verging on that lurch into adolescence and viewing with a mixture of awe and alarm the teens who've made that transition.