Love Letters to the Dead was such an interesting and refreshing take on storytelling. I love anything that is similar to journal/diary entries, so the letter format was such a captivating way to receive the story. It also broke it up into manageable chunks, so it was super easy to get through. I loved the addition of Laurel writing to specific icons throughout history, because it added that much more character depth to Laurel and how she thought and processed her emotions. As for the plot of the story, I enjoyed reading about Laurel’s everyday life and her relationships with her high school friends. There was angst, romance, and pain, which is always a good time. It was also written in a way that is so true to an adolescent mind trying to make sense of the world and all of these new experiences and emotions. I grew attached to all of the side characters quickly and my heart broke for them on multiple occasions, which is always a good sign for world-building in a story that’s centered on a small group of people. I feel like the author beautifully tackled hard-hitting subjects like grief, sexuality, and how to cope with various forms of love when life is pulling you in different directions. (I highlighted 127 lines if that is any indicator of how much I loved the author’s writing.) I don’t really understand why this book received so many poor reviews. Most of them are about Laurel being too immature/unrelatable as a character, but I felt the exact opposite. I felt like her confusion, pessimism, and slow developments/revelations on how she felt about her sister’s death were as realistic as one could get. To each their own, I guess.
My only problem with the book was actually with the reason behind May’s death and the big plot reveal I guess you could say towards the last 25% of the book. I don’t want to go into too much detail for the sake of spoiling the last portion of the book, but if you read the trigger warnings you already know what I’m talking about. I completely understand that a topic/situation like that is far too common for young girls and should be talked about, but for the love of God is there not any other form of conflict that a female protagonist can have in a YA contemporary novel? At the risk of sounding insensitive, it’s like beating a dead literary horse. Within the first few chapters I guessed what happened to Laurel and her sister, and I wasn’t wrong. Again, not that it wasn’t a valid conflict for the story to have, I just feel as though there could have been something different that happened to the sisters that would still allow the story to have the impact that it did. In light of all this, I still ended up giving the book four stars because I just love the characters and their relationships that damn much, and I’ll take solid character building over a shitty plot twist any day of the week.

Full review here: https://youtu.be/_Qxw4BFlxfo

I can see how this book might not be for everyone, but it made me cry and cry and cry and I loved it.

This book had so much hype and I was left a little disappointed with it. I mean I was bored throughout the book with a few good parts in between a lot of nothing happening. It was a cute premise and I liked the letter format but I was left a little like that's it?

Broke my heart in the most amazing way. I cried and I cried. Reminded me very strongly of [b:The Perks of Being a Wallflower|22628|The Perks of Being a Wallflower|Stephen Chbosky|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1363910637s/22628.jpg|2236198].

Adoré este libro. Completamente. Hay una parte de este libro que sigue en mi mente. «estábamos entre la línea entre quienes éramos y quienes queríamos ser», no es así, no literalmente, pero algo así es y me encanta.

I liked this book but had trouble with the narrator. At times she sounded super young and I would have found her back story more believable if she were actually a year or so younger. I also found the present-day setting unbelievable as the characters were all obsessed with 80s-90s and classic rock artists like Nirvana, Guns and Roses, Slash, The Doors, and Janis Joplin. Would have been more effective is set in the 90s. Anyways that being said it was a decent read. Told in epistolary form, a girl coping with the death of her sister writes a diary in the form of letters to dead people. The reader has to piece together information and doesn't get the whole truth until the narrator is ready to reveal it. Quick read dealing with tons of emotional issues, but could be better with a few tweaks.

Laurel started writing letters to dead people. First it was Kurt Cobain. Then Judy Garland. What began as an innocent piece of English homework morphed into consolation who recently lost her older sister. Nobody reads the letters though. Nobody but Laurel herself. Love Letters to the Dead is a story of loss and grief, of settling into a new school, resisting the temptation of teenage life, and of drilling into those memories which we would rather leave suppressed. Without May, Laurel is struggling to stay afloat. But is deflecting her past and concealing the truth the only way for her to survive, or will it only push her deeper into misery?

Letter writing in general is a very personal, intimate act. The epistolary format of this novel draws us towards Laurel’s mind through a sensitive tone; one of repressed agony and quiet beauty. Dellaira’s aching narrative of intense, complicated sisterly love and of imperfect truths, frightens the audience with the reality that death cannot be escaped. Loyalty drives the main character to suppress self-inflicting information: memories that she cannot accept and would rather not vocalise. Alongside this, the author openly tackles acceptance of diversity in a high school community. It utilises sexuality to proclaim that love is love; we are all human. Sadly, this novel is severely hindered by an imitation of Stephen Chbosky’s coming of age tale, The Perks of Being a Wallflower. It becomes unoriginal and indistinguishable in already crowded genre.

The letters that Laurel wrote over the course of a year are a document of her muddling through life, moving on and accepting those repressed memories. After fighting against the trauma of her sister’s death for over a year, finally, Laurel writes to her sister. In unburdening herself of her May’s ghost, Laurel blossoms into herself. Dellaira’s debut may lack ingenuity, yet it is a satisfactory effort with brief moments of pure, poetic brilliance.

I got what the author was attempting to do with her novel, understood why her characters were the way they were, and felt hooked by the premise. There were just to many things I could not get past as a reader: The passive narrator, Laurel, who never speaks to anyone about her issues unless forced. The weaving inner monologue and flowery prose. The completely clichéd situations and friends that Laurel finds. I wanted to like this book so much, but couldn't.