Nice piece of realistic fiction about loss and growing up.

Wow, this book is.. I don't even know what word I'd choose for this book. It is sad but at the same time really beautiful. She was writing to all these amazing people and I was impressed. With her and what she went through. She really was brave and she didn't even realised it. This book touches my heart because I'm fighting against myself and I want to be saved but at the same time I don't want to. But somehow this book gave me power to try, not for myself but everyone else. I see how everyone suffers because of her sister and I wonder would it be the same if a went away. But I really don't want to leave this world. Here is why love reading books like this one. It shows me that I have to be brave and just let some things go. It gives me an opportunity to look trough someone else's eyes and to see that not everything in my life is bad.


In the end I just want to say that I'm glad she succeed to save herself and that she started to live in the moment and not in the past.

This was an emotionally heavy story. And a great debut for Dellaira.

The concept of writing a letter to a dead person is really fascinating, so I immediately wanted to pick up this book. The format of this book, all letters, was a bit bothersome to me at first. I just wasn't sure if that would be something I could tolerate for an entire book, but because there was a lot of dialogue within those letters, I didn't find it to be too unbearable.

Love Letters to the Dead follows a young teenage girl, Laurel, who is trying to cope with the death of her older sister, May, as well as make it through adolescence. We find out a lot about Laurel from the very beginning. This girl feels...a lot. And it takes me a while to be able to handle it.

The book starts off a bit slow, but once it picks up, it doesn't slow back down. Laurel is definitely a complext character. She feels and feels and feels. She's a sponge with no release. And that's what she's seaching for throughout the book -- a release. Her sister May is gone, her parents are going through their own thing. And she has no one to really help her process. So when the assignment of writing to a dead person is given, she takes it and run with it.

She writes to various people such as Amelia Earhart, Kurt Cobain, Amy Winehouse, Janis Joplin, Heath Ledger... She writes to anyone who will listen to her.

It took me a while to really care about Laurel because she honestly overwhelmed me. I thought she was too much. And I still do. I did eventually adjust to the "much" that Laurel was and I began to care about her. The supporting characters throughout the book also had their own personal stories that were told through Laurel's eyes, and I began to care about them before I did Laurel. Sky, in my opinion, was a very relatable character for me. He was the most authentic, through flawed.

Dellaira does a great job of painting a powerfully sad adolescent experience. There is just so much that is absorbed throughout the book that by the end of it, you need your own release as a reader. And I think that's intentional.

I really enjoyed this book, because it didn't take much to create it. There was no major world building. Not huge plot line. Just a story about a girl growing up, falling in love, learning to forgive and deal with a harsh hand she's been dealt. A really decent read.

Algo aburrido en algunas partes pero estuvo bien.

I struggled to get through this title. It didn't grab my attention in the way that I thought it would. I feel like I learned more about the public figures that Laurel wrote letters to (Kurt Cobain, Amy Winehouse, Janis Joplin, etc.) than about Laurel herself, until the very end of the book when a lot of information was given to the reader about her past. The book had some profound, make-you-think moments, but it ultimately wasn't for me.

Click here to read my full review, on my book blog.

4.4/5

It wasn't a bad book. It's written through such a young perspective, though. I liked the writing though despite the young perspectives.