There's quite a variety of novels out there that employ letters to convey a story to a reader. The one that always comes to mind first for me is Judy Bloom's Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret. But there are many, many others that use correspondence to tell us a story. Among my favorites are The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society and Where'd You Go, Bernadette?, along with the newly released Love Letters to the Dead by Ava Dellaira.
It starts out as an English assignment, the first one at Laurel's new high school: write a letter to a dead person of your choice. It would be a perfect way to bring up May, the sister who died the past year, but that's the opposite of what Laurel wants to do. She'd rather just start over new here, so she instead writes to Kurt Kobain. Laurel doesn't turn in the assignment. Instead she writes more letters, to Amelia Earhart and John Keats and Janis Joplin among others, and her story unfolds for us there.
Missing the sister that she lost and determined to be more like her, Laurel starts to wear May's old clothes, drink, and go to parties. She's convinced that this is the way to recapture her sister, to remember her and become the sort of vibrant person that she was. But things spiral out of control, as they often do in similar situations, and instead Laurel is left feeling even more lost than before. If she's not her old self, and she can't be May, who is she? She'll only find out by confronting what happened the night that May died, and by seeing her for the person that she really was.
Luckily, this isn't a journey that Laurel has to make alone. She makes some great friends at her new high school, her teachers and parents would help her if they knew how, and of course there are the dead actors, writers, poets, musicians, and folk heroes to whom Laurel pours out her heart in her letters. Each of them has a special connection to her situation, and Laurel brings those into her correspondences, explaining to the letter's "recipient" and the reader why she's chosen to write to a given person at a given time.
There was an awful lot going on in the Difficulty Department for Laurel, and I was a little bit afraid that it would be too much at once and start to sound a little bit over-the-top. But the way that everything worked together, the way that her issues were all related and centered around her unrealistic memory of May, her self-destructiveness, was very well orchestrated. All the issues made sense in context of one another, and the character of Sky really helped to cut through Laurel's skewed perspective. I was very impressed with his mature attitude in the face of Laurel and her unbalanced state, and his refusal to follow her down her path of romanticizing May and her death made me want to stand and applaud. He's just one of the very fun, dynamic characters that occupy this novel.
If you like Laurie Halse Anderson's work (and she has a long list of fantastic Young Adult books to her name) and are ready to fall in love with a vibrant, beautiful character struggling to overcome some big challenges, pick up a copy of Ava Dellaira's Love Letters to the Dead. It's a great read, and is available at your local independent bookstore right now!
No comments:
Post a Comment