A sheltered young high society woman joins the army on a whim and finds herself in a more difficult situation than she ever expected.

Vada Sultenfuss is obsessed with death. Her mother is dead, and her father runs a funeral parlor. She is also in love with her English teacher, and joins a poetry class over the summer just to impress him. Thomas J., her best friend, is “allergic to everything”, and sticks with Vada despite her hangups. When Vada’s father hires Shelly, and begins to fall for her, things take a turn to the worse…

This morning they were playing ping-pong in the hospital rec room. Now they’re lost in New York and framed for murder. This was never covered in group therapy.

Vada Sultenfuss has a holiday coming up, and an assignment: to do and essay on someone she admires and has never met. She decides she wants to do an assignment on her mother, but quickly realises she knows very little about her. She manages to get her father to agree to let her go to LA to stay with her Uncle Phil and do some research on her mother.