This book was so amazing. Even though it reminded me a lot about the perks of being a wallflower, I still enjoyed it. This book made me think about people and the shields they put up. A really beautiful quote was used in the book: people love you for what they see in you, not for who you are. And that made me so sad, and happy at the same time. By the ending of this book I was crying for many reasons, and I know that this book will stay with me for some time...

I can't express how badly I wanted to love this book. I read this book because of the hype, the great reviews on here, and because I had been looking for something with a meaningful look on death and sisterhood.

Overall this narrator is on some kind of identity-seeking quest, writing letters to dead people she doesn't know personally. Which is an interesting concept, because the one dead person whose death has personally hurt her enough to start her identity-quest, is only mentioned in passing. It is easier to acknowledge death when it is not personal. Her attempts to make these celebrities personal are tawdry.

Her letters to the dead celebrities contain a few details and references that I could have gotten skimming wikipedia. This narrator so distraught by the death of her sister that she refuses to ever say a single detail about it. So instead these letters become a diary in disguise that isn't disguised.
So when she falls in love with the stereotypical bad boy, her love letters to the dead are actually just love letters to this boy (Sky) sandwiched between celebrity references and the narrator's projections of how the celebrities would be if they were still alive. It is an exercise in what not to do while writing an epistolary. The plot of this book and the passiveness of the narrator cheapen the whole "love letters to the dead" concept so much that the entire format is wasted and ruined.

This was probably one of the best books I have read in a while. I loved the writing style and the letters to people of the past. The connection to music, musicians, and their songs was very interesting and enjoyable. I liked her sort of awkward relationship with Sky, and I couldn't read this book fast enough to find out how everything was going to pan out. I can't express enough how much I loved this book.

Love Letters to the Dead by Ava Dellaira

Laurel is assigned to write a letter to a dead person in English class, and this starts a long list of letters to the dead she starts to write over the course of the school year. She writes about everything from new school, new friendships first loves and her newly splinted family. She also writes about her sister May and what happen with her. Can Laurel find out who she is and discover her own path with the past weighting on her?

I love this novel so much, from the first page to the very last. I love that it breaks the mold of how you write a book. This book is written in letter form, but not just letters; Letters to dead people like Kurt Cobain and River Phoenix both whom I love.
About 25 pages in you now that something happen, you not sure what but you know that is was bad. You slowly start to find out bits and pieces in each letter, but you now that it will be a heartbreaking story. It was heartbreaking and I cried. (That’s the amazing thing) I love laurel, she’s just this lost girl trying to understand and deal with everything just as everything around her is falling apart. I find her brave and strong.

This Novel is beautifully and emotionally written to the point where you feel the main characters are real.
I love everything but some of the slow points, but I understand that this book is meant to be slow and amazing. I am giving it 4 out of 5 stars.

This is an amazing debut novel by Ava Dellaira.

Type: Standalone
Publication Date:
Genre: Contemporary Young Adult
Rating: 4/5 Stars

Thank you NetGalley for the Arc.

a book my friend lent me to cope! thank you for your kindness :-)

I was originally going to give this book 2 stars, but at the last minute it changed to 3. Why? The plot of this book did not move an inchey-squinch until around 250 pages in (of 323, might I add). I am truly disappointed by this.

I was drawn to this book by its poetic title and beautiful cover. I mean, it's gorgeous. All I knew about this book going in was that it was about a girl writing letters to dead people about her dead sister, and that it was only in letters. That concept intrigued me. I also have heard it compared to The Perks, which I have not read, so that did not bother me as much as other people.

Basically, the first 250 pages were all stories about Laurel's daily life. There wasn't a ton of character development or backstory or anything, just little snippets and beating around the bush as to way May (the sister) had died. It got to be kind of boring after awhile. Personally, I couldn't relate to the characters. I'm a homeschooler, I've never been to high school, and the lifestyle Laurel and her friends lead is just so alien to me. Then, things started moving after 250 pages. But even still, I could not connect to any of the characters. I don't really care about what happens to them, or what decisions they make. I wasn't really rooting for them. I didn't really care when Laurel finally stopped blaming herself and starting letting things go. The only thing I really like was the poetry aspect in the book, which wasn't much.

Also, the writing was a bit odd. I get that it's supposed to be a 14(ish?) year-old writing letters, but some of the sentences were just weird to read. They weren't necessarily grammatically incorrect, they just didn't flow right. Sometimes I felt like the tenses were a bit off as well. I wasn't really pleased with the writing style.

I think this book would be better if it had been more of a book about how she got over her sister's suicide, not just this weird limbo of sadness. It would have been phenomenal if this was based off of a true story, or were the actual letters of a teen, that they had decided to publish to help others dealing with suicide.

So all in all, this book was ok. Would I have read it had I known what it was like previously? Most likely not. Would I recommend it? No. The story is not deep or gripping enough to spend the time on it, in my opinion, even though it isn't that long. It looks pretty on my shelf, but that is all.

This review was originally posted at Girl in the Pages.

Love Letters to the Dead is officially the book of 2014 that has me completely stumped on what to rate it (hence the ambiguous rating at the top of this post. I have a love/hate relationship with this book. I was drawn in by the fascinating concept and the pretty cover, but then completely aggravated by the first half of the book’s narrative voice. Then things take such a gut wrenching twist at the end that I could not put it down.

I hate to criticize this book because I feel like Laurel’s story is a powerful one, but the first half of the book felt like it was being narrated by a ten year old. Laurel is starting high school, which probably puts her age around fourteen or fifteen, yet she speaks in such choppy, short, and simplistic sentences that it makes her sound like she’s in elementary school, which is totally at odds with the situations she’s in as a high schooler and the new experiences she’s having. It seriously drove me crazy and I was very close to marking this book a DNF.

*Some Spoilers Ahead/Trigger Warning*

Yet the story line really picked up about 70% in and I couldn’t put it down. I had to know what abuse Laurel had suffered in the past. I had to know how her sister May died. And after I found out, I had to know what the fallout would be. The sexual abuse she suffered was devastating, but also a situation that impacts many, many young girls, and I’m glad Laurel decides to speak up about it at the end of the book, although I wish we had seen more of how she went about dealing with the abuse once it was out in the open. Dellaira deals with the issues of sexual abuse, the stigmatization of non-hetero-sexuality, and sexual awakening in what I felt was a rather candid way, and I appreciated the struggles the characters encountered while facing these issues that are often ignored or glossed over because they are uncomfortable (such as Hannah’s intimacy with much older guys, and it’s always dubious as to why she is with them and if she is truly consenting).

*End Spoilers/Trigger Warning*

Though Laurel’s narrative voice aggravated me, I really enjoyed reading about the various stages of her relationship with Sky. It made me remember the pains and elation of dating for the first time in high school, and having your entire world at that time hinge upon another person as you first discover what you think might be love, and the fallout when it doesn’t work out. He was also a surprisingly empathetic character, and his story tethers in cleverly with both Laurel’s and May’s. I also liked how Laurel’s parents were mentioned, and their history and coping was noted by Laurel, rather than making them non-entities.

I actually think this book could’ve stood well on its own without the letters to the dead aspect. Sometimes I got annoyed with Laurel discussing the background of the letter recipient’s story (although I realize it was supposed to parallel her own or May’s at the time) because I was so anxious to find out what had happened to Laurel and May. I think Dellaira has the potential to be a great author to tell heartbreaking, candid stories without the letter format or from borrowing so much from other authors (I’m not going to go into it in length, but as most readers know she borrowed really heavily from her mentor Stephen Cbosky’s Perks of Being a Wallflower, and the outcome is not exactly subtle). Dellaira manages to create a simultaneous tragic contemporary with an undercurrent of fantastical and eerie elements, through the character of May, who is truly an enigma. Aspects of her personality and actions, such as her obsession with fairies or the “dead” game, coupled with Laurel’s worshipful opinion of her, made her seem like an ethereal creature.


Favorite Quote:

“You think you know someone, but that person always changes, and you keep changing, too. I understood it suddenly, how that’s what being alive means. Our own invisible plates shifting inside of our bodies, beginning to align into the people we are going to become.”

Overall: Love Letters to the Dead has a great plot and story line that’s obscured by an irritating narrative voice and too many borrowed elements. If you can get past those obstacles, there’s fascinating characters and a candid account of the painful truth of being a teenager. As a debut author, I’m interested to see what Dellaira writes next, hopefully with more original style.

Would I recommend it: It’s definitely worth reading at least once! The story stays with you- it gave me book-hangover!

I'm not crying, you're crying