This is a novel about an almost perfect girl and how she temporarily comes undone. Growing up in her small North Carolina hometown, Jo Spencer was a girl who knew what to be and how to be it - straight-A student, cheerleader, May Queen, popular and cute and virginal, and in perfect control. Halfway through her first year in college, her carefully "normal" life explodes. In The Cheer Leader, Jo Spencer looks back, as if she were watching reruns of old syndicated TV shows, to figure out what happened.