"Osama bin Sullivan", "American Taliban slut", "You're going to hell!" Cassie Sullivan had no idea defending Darwin and refusing to sing "Proud to Be an American" would be such a big deal, but it's a brave new world of post-9/11 paranoia, religious intolerance, and spineless school officials, and Cassie quickly finds herself isolated in junior high hell. Are her beliefs worth the torment? Is anything worth the torment? Feeling completely misunderstood, Cassie dedicates herself to recording the most trying year of her life in her journal and looking for answers in the writing of Hemingway, Tolkien, Kurt Cobain, and others. She discovers, though, that the answer will have to be her own creation - if there is an answer at all. "Or Not" isn't simply the story of a girl discovering who she wants to be; it's an intimate, hilarious, poignant portrait of a girl as she decides whether she wants to be at all, or not.