Un concentré d'amour, de folie, de sensibilité ,de peur et d'impuissance face à nos vies et nos jeunesses perdues. A lire absolument !

I'm not really sure what to say about this. I half liked it - I'd give it more like a 2.5 if I could. It was really difficult to tell when the story took place because there's all these really old mentions in the book. The narrator is writing to people like Judy Garland and Amelia Earhart, talking about how her sister who was only three years older loved River Phoenix and Kurt Cobain, and her Aunt loves Mr. Ed. Not that it's not at all plausible -- but for a story that's (I think) supposed be set sometime around 2013/2014, it doesn't seem exactly centered in our century. For instance, mentions of technology are few and far between, as if added as afterthoughts.

To add to that, the premise of the story, the main character's dead sister is stretched out for so long that by the time you get there, you've pretty much guessed what happened anyway.

It feels like there's a lot of baby boomer sentimentality in a novel that's supposed to be about a Gen Z/Founders generation kid.

Honestly hated it so I didn't even finish it. I read the first 30-40 pages and skimmed the rest. The premise is good, but the story is overtaken by teen drama and homosexuality. Not my thing at all.

gorgeous cover. Just....I did not enjoy it.
The letters felt repetitive and I didn't feel the depth of feeling I think I was supposed to see in them. I just found them kind of....silly and the book terribly boring.

While I was reading Love Letters to the Dead I kept calling it “heartbreaking and charming.” When I updated my status on Goodreads, when people asked me if I liked it my answer was always yes and it’s so heartbreaking and charming. After finishing it those are still the words I would absolutely use to describe it.

The heartbreaking aspect should be pretty obvious if you know anything about this book. Laurel’s older sister May passed away a few months before the book starts and Laurel is trying to figure out how to live in a world without May. The story begins with Laurel starting high school. Her parents are divorced and after May died her mother decided she needed to go away and grieve on her own. Laurel splits her time between her dad’s house and her Aunt May’s house. Rather than going to the same high school May attended, Laurel goes to a different high school where she doesn’t know anyone. Watching Laurel, who’s so broken, be all alone, eating lunch by herself, trying to buy the “cool” thing to eat for lunch so she fits in, was so sad. Eventually she makes friends with two girls, Hannah and Natalie, and while I was happy that she had friends, it wasn’t clear if Hannah and Natalie, who flirt with older guys to get the guys who buy them alcohol and cut class, were good friends for Laurel to have.

Most of the heartbreaking aspects have to do with May’s death. Laurel has never told anyone the truth about the night that May died, we don’t find out what really happened until the end of the book, but in this case it worked because Laurel can barely admit the truth to herself. As more of May and Laurel’s history unfolds it just gets more and more heartbreaking. May, the older sister, was kind of like a second mother to Laurel, trying to protect her from their arguing parents and protect Laurel from some of the more evil parts of life. It becomes obvious that although May tried to protect Laurel she failed at protecting herself and ultimately also at protecting Laurel. Not only did she fail at protecting Laurel, but indirectly some of the ways she taught Laurel to cope actually ended up contributing to Laurel’s difficulty acknowledging what happened to her and acknowledging May’s death.

Even though there was all this sadness in the story I was completely charmed by Laurel’s voice. She’s young, but she’s also wise beyond her years in a very realistic way. She’s also one of the most empathetic characters I’ve come across, she feels so much in such a mature way. The whole concept of the book is Laurel writing letters to dead people (which is originally a beginning of the year assignment from her English teacher). She writes to people her sister loved like Kurt Cobain and River Phoenix, she writes to poets she reads in class like Elizabeth Bishop and John Keats, she writes to Allan Lane (the voice of Mr. Ed) who her aunt loves, and she writes to people she admires like Amelia Earhart. Not only does she write to them about her life, she writes to them about their lives (she obviously puts a lot of research into the letters) and makes such interesting connections between their lives and her own life and also society at large. I was completely taken in by the tone of the letters and they made me really fall in love with Laurel.

In the end though this book just didn’t sit right with me. I’ve thought about it and thought about it and ultimately I decided that it’s too similar to The Perks of Being a Wallflower for me to be able to get past. Yes, there are many differences, but there are also many similarities and knowing that Ava Dellaira is Stephen Chbosky’s protege just reinforced that idea in my head. Clearly that didn’t hold me back from connecting with the book, but it did hold me back from really loving it.

The book is also fairly sinister, maybe this is a naive outlook, but I don’t know if I believe the world is really that sinister. I don’t know if so many older guys go trolling for such young girls. It happens over and over again in the story and I don’t doubt it happens, especially when the girls are often looking for these guys, but the frequency of this storyline in the book got to me.

Bottom Line: This really is a heartbreaking and charming read. In the end I fell in love with the main character and the tone of the book, but I just couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something about the story that just didn’t work for me. I was bothered by the similarities to The Perks of Being a Wallflower and the use of the older man/young girl storyline, but in the end I did enjoy the book and admire what Ava Dellaira did enough to make my up for my reservations.

I received an electronic review copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley (thank you!). All opinions are my own.

This review first appeared on my blog.

Review to come.

Overall: 4/5 stars for me. It had a little bit of everything and I sobbed through most of it

2.5

Having just finished Jane Gardam's masterpiece epistolary novel, [b:The Queen of the Tambourine|268104|The Queen of the Tambourine|Jane Gardam|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1347701173s/268104.jpg|1179188], it's asking too much for this nicely-done book for teens to measure up. Flourless dark chocolate cake vs. an MM; the Rockies vs. the pleasant hill near my house. I guess what makes me shrug is the utter predictability of a certain kind of YA book, as if it's written on a very precise formula (as many genre romance books are). There are zero surprises, zero reversals. I can see how this would be a great read for a certain kind of teen but the impact of the book would be slight for many more.

"I know I wrote letters to people with no address on this earth, I know that you are dead. But I hear you. I hear all of you. We were here. Our lives matter."

This was a so-so read for me. I didn't love it, but I didn't dislike it either. The concept was compelling, and the raw emotionality of the book made it a fast-paced read, but there were a lot of aspects about it that concerned me.

While reading this, I thought of myself as a freshman in high school, the same age as Laurel, and how impressionable I was, and I'm honestly really glad I didn't pick this up when I was that age. Its vulnerability masks a lot of its melodrama, small exaggerations and generalizations I would have thoroughly absorbed as realistic if I had read this when I was fifteen.

For example, while Laurel laments her loneliness in the first few letters, she is somehow able to find instant best friends after less than a month at her new school, which, speaking from experience, is absolutely not how things go. Natalie, Hannah, Kristen, and Tristan all become her friends almost instantly, with no effort on her part whatsoever, and within days of these friendships being formed they're having slumber parties and doing all kinds of crazy stuff together. Real friendships take time to build, but Dellaira chose to escalate that process for the sake of the story.

Another relationship that fell into place for Laurel without absolutely no effort was that with Sky, which bothered me far more. Sky was a perfect boyfriend. Like, absolutely perfect. Sixteen-year-old boys with admitted emotional baggage do not just drop out of - excuse my choice of cliche - the sky like that. Choosing to portray a teenage boy like that is a dangerous game to play when you're writing primarily for young teens.

What bothered me most of all, though, was all the damn crying. Every other page, somebody, usually Laurel, was sobbing. It really got on my nerves. There are other ways to express intense emotional feeling.

And I get it - it's YA. It's supposed to be a little melodramatic and overdrawn. But when you're writing about a character who has been through as much as Laurel went through, you have to consider your audience, and how they will absorb and regurgitate a story like this. There's a responsibility that comes with it.

All that melodrama, though, did really help this book to achieve what it set out to be: a touching, coming-of-age novel that truly captures grief and what it means to figure out whom you're supposed to be.

Told solely through letter to different famous dead people, Laurel explains her life after her older sister dies. After the accident Laurel wants to start fresh so she starts at a new high school, meets new friends and starts to act like her sister to feel like she's still there. Through the letters and begin able to talk about what happen, Laurel finds out who she really is. Although this book seemed interesting it didn't really keep my attention and I only read about half way before stopping. Might come back to it later and try and finish it.