Unique book. Love the unique way of storytelling through her writing letters to dead people she admires.

Nevisai mano stiliaus knyga, bet buvo įdomu ir kažką kitą paimti į rankas. Knyga yra apie netektį. Knygoje paliečiama labai daug temų: nuo meilės, ryšio su tėvais iki draugystės ir netekties. Knyga rašo, kad skirta paaugliams, tačiau, aš manau, kad kai kurios mintys aprašomos joje priverčia labai susimąstyti ir pagalvoti. Svarbiausias knygos klausimas – kaip susitaikyti su kito žmogaus netektimi ir kaip kaip jam atleisti, jei to žmogaus jau nebėra. Tikrai ne vakaro skaitinys, bet kam patinka tokio stiliaus knygos – rekomenduoju.

I'll be honest, this wasn't as good as I expected it to be. Perhaps it's because of the hype around it and I just expected so much more from it, but it was sort of boring and the letter part was essentially unnecessary considering it didn't talk about who she was writing to very often, when she did it made sense and it was cute, but it didn't really work for the entire book.

I'm not entirely sure what I expected to get out of this novel other than exactly what its premise promised - girl writes letters to dead celebrities in an attempt to piece together her own sister's death - but it left me disappointed nonetheless. It's been quite a while since I've read an epistolary novel, so I was excited to dive back into the premise, but it felt tired and forced by the twenty-page mark.

Love Letters to the Dead follows a girl named Laurel as she begins her freshman year of high school in the wake of her sister's mysterious death the prior year. She's given an assignment in her English class to write a letter to a dead person, and the novel sort of flows from there. Well actually, what it turns into is: Hello [dead musician/actor/poet/etc.], My sister and I were conveniently extremely huge fans of yours, and I also conveniently just so happen to have pictures of you all over my wall. Here's what happened in the ninth grade today. You would've thought it was cool because you were just so super cool, and this continues for over three hundred pages. This dead-celebrity concept works for about twenty pages until it feels so forced you're taken out of the story: Laurel and her sister's favorite band just so happens to be Nirvana because of Kurt Cobain, their favorite movie just so happens to be Stand by Me because of River Phoenix, her friend's all-time favorite musician is Amy Winehouse, her favorite poems are written by E.E. Cummings, and the list goes on. This might've worked if these letters were more than four or five pages, but switching celebrities every few pages and having to hear about how cool and relatable they were repeatedly was jarring.

Concept aside, this ends up simply being a YA contemporary detailing a fifteen-year-old's everyday life as she goes through her freshman year of high school, falls in love for the first time, creates a new group of friends, and all that other mundane stuff that, yes, is perfect for a diary but typically doesn't get published as a novel. The "mystery" of what happened to Laurel's sister is omnipresent but is never interesting enough to drive the plot forward. Ava Dellaira does attempt to bring awareness to sexual assault throughout the novel, but it's thrown in so often that it loses its intended effect (how are these fifteen-year-olds repeatedly finding themselves dating men in their twenties? What is wrong with all these men?).

I realized three pages in that I'm not the intended audience for this novel, so that surely affected my enjoyment of it. There's nothing inherently wrong with the story, and actually does offer a couple nice meditations on life and death, but it was simply too mundane to elevate itself to anything enjoyable.

This book felt so much longer than it truly was. I think part of the problem is that, despite the title, I don't think the letter format quite fits here... I can't completely explain that, though.

I was also majorly annoyed by how similar this book and its storyline was to Chobsky's Perks. The similarities seemed so freakish that I couldn't be surprised to learn Chobsky is Dellaira's "friend and mentor". It's still annoying though, because I do crave originality. This might also lend an explanation to why the book felt so long: I felt like I had read it all before. And I didn't love it all that much the first time around.

Despite the negatives, there were some deeply beautiful lines in this novel that made me like it a little more. (See quotes in status updates.)

Perhaps the real issue is that I am no longer accustomed to reading teen/YA lit. And that definitely makes me a little sad. However, I am also reminded of YA novels I have read that haven't seemed like they were written for a teenage audience, and that gives me hope. You see, YA lit doesn't have to be written with certain personas and themes--there are successful alternatives.

Pros: I appreciate a few good lines here/there and I liked learning more about the letter "recipients".

The concept of this book sounded interesting, that is why I picked it up. But the actually book is a mess…
It had good moments, but overall I was not blown away in any way, shape, or form. It frustrated me because there were times when I felt the writing was getting at something important and powerful, but it just didn't delivery.
The writing was too inconsistent; the format was unique, instead off the usual "Dear Diary", it was Dear (insert dead person here). The main character wrote her diary in the form off letters to dead famous people. But even that got boring very fast.
I think it would have made more sense, if Laurel had written the entire book to her sister! May. (But then no catch title) I felt like the fact that Laurel wrote letters to the dead was just to lure readers (it sure fooled me). The fact that the letters were so inconsistent also made me feel like they were unnecessary. And, I just hated that she keep telling these dead celebrities about their own lives. "They" know all about their childhoods. Why are you explaining their own lives to them?
I later found out that Stephan Chbosky, of The Perks of Being a Wallflower fame, was Ava Dellaira’s mentor and also endorsed this book… If I knew that before, I would've stayed away from this book.

(4.5 stars)
I had to reread Love Letters to the Dead for a class project and connected to Laurel again on a different level. This book is very hard to process as a teenager, but after a few years of academia I could understand better Laurel's complex grief process and relate to it after the death of my own brother. Laurel's coping mechanisms were very unhealthy, but the author did a fantastic job at not romanticizing Laurel's alcohol abuse but rather using it as a tool to show readers how dangerous it is to rely on these substances during the grief process.

Es un libro dentro de todo básicos con una historia interesante de fondo. Solo pensé que se centraría mas en eso y que tendría mas profundidad y por eso digamos que me decepcionó un poco. Me gusto el final en como ella de descubre a si misma y dice que guarda en ella piezas de su hermana pero que finalmente descubrió quien es. Siento que hay cosas o situaciones que quedaron un poco sueltas y no me gusta cuando no terminan de darle una finalidad a eso, no lo hace un mal libro. Solo quería que fuera más. Tuvo frases buenas