Love Letters to the Dead - Ava Dellaira

[goodreads]

Title: Love Letters to the Dead
Author: Ava Dellaira
Genre: YA, epistolary
Rating: 3/5
# pages: 336 pages
Date read: July, 2015

It begins as an assignment for English class: Write a letter to a dead person.

Laurel chooses Kurt Cobain because her sister, May, loved him. And he died young, just like May. Soon, Laurel has a notebook full of letters to the dead - to people like Janis Joplin, Heath Ledger, Amelia Earhart, and Amy Winehouse - though she never gives a single one of them to her teacher. She writes about starting high school, navigating the choppy waters of new friendships, learning to live with her splintering family, falling in love for the first time, and, most important, trying to grieve for May. But how do you mourn for someone you haven't forgiven?

It's not until Laurel has written the truth about what happened to herself that she can finally accept what happened to May. And only when Laurel has begun to see her sister as the person she was - lovely and amazing and deeply flawed — can she truly start to discover her own path.


A really weird reading experience. For the first 60-70% I didn't care overly much for it, and actually put it down for long stretches at a time. But even so, whenever I considered just giving up on it altogether, something would happen that would make me want to read more after all.

Then yesterday the book redeemed itself to me. Instead of continuing down her distructive path, three quarters of the way through the book Laurel suddenly started making smarter choices and actually voiced her thoughts and her troubles, instead of letting them move her to make stupid decisions.

Which meant that I ended up absolutely loving the last 25% of the book, and had tears in my eyes as I reached the end.

I can't in good conscience recommend the book, as the first half really was a slog to get through. But for myself I'm glad I kept at it, as the end really did make the rest worthwhile.