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.