By Elizabeth Craft and Sarah Fain

Bass Ackwards and Belly Up is about four best friends — Becca, Harper, Kate and Sophie. Harper finds out that she wasn’t admitted to NYU, the only school she’s applied to. Instead of being honest with her three best friends, she comes up with a story about how she’s decided to take a year off to fulfill her dream of writing the next Great American Novel and go to NYU next year.

Harper feels horrible when the speech she delivers to her friends is so good that they all decide to take a year to work on their life dreams as well. Sophie’s dream is to move to California and become an actress. Kate puts off Harvard, which is her parents’ dream, and decides to travel the world and find out what she wants to do with her life. Becca actually goes along with her original college plan since her dream is to attend that school and ski on its ski team. But she adds “fall in love” to the plan.

Harper sticks around at home (in Boulder, Co.), living in her parents’ basement, working at a coffee shop, lusting after her high school English teacher, and writing the next Great American Novel. The book jumps around from one girl’s story to the next, showing us how their year of dreams is going.

Rated: High (particularly if read by young adults). The book has a lot of bad language, with maybe a handful of uses of the F-word, and it’s nonchalantly spoken by these girls. There is also a lot of sex.