When Laurel gets an assignment for an English class to write
a letter to a dead person, the death of her sister, May,
sits even heavier on her heart. She begins the assignment by
writing to someone that May liked, Kurt Cobain, but soon,
Laurel is writing to all sorts of dead people from Amelia
Earhart to Heath Ledger. She doesn't turn any of them in to
complete the assignment, but she is discovering more and
more how much emotion she is getting out by writing them,
emotion she doesn't want anyone to see. Between the letters
and her newly found friends, Laurel starts to find that
maybe opening up and being honest is exactly what she needs
to recover from the tragedy.
LOVE LETTERS TO THE DEAD by Ava Dellaira is a beautiful
novel that explores the struggles of accepting a dead loved
one for who he or she really was in life, the good and the
bad. It examines the heartache of not being able to open up
when someone is reaching out a hand that you just can't seem
to grasp. Laurel is a young girl drowning in sorrow, and her
voice through the letters is engrossing and real.
I especially enjoy her love interest, Sky, though I wish
there was more of his side of things in the story. He has
his own struggles that he deals with, and while those
struggles play a decent part of the story for a while, they
kind of fade off when I wish more had been explored. It
would have been interesting to see the story alternating
perspectives with him and Laurel, though with it just being
on Laurel, there is a lot of room to see her tragedies.
Though I do really like LOVE LETTERS TO THE DEAD, and I
think Ava Dellaira has a wonderful way of storytelling, it
stands a little too close to Perks of Being a Wallflower in
terms of general story line for me to completely love it. I
love read-a-likes, but this one had a bit too many parallels
for my taste, though I still enjoy the story very much.
Dellaira still seems to have loads of talent based on this
book, and I will definitely look for more from her.
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
did. Soon, Laurel has a notebook full of letters to people
like Janis Joplin, Amy Winehouse, Amelia Earhart, Heath
Ledger, and more — though she never gives a single one of
them to her teacher. She writes about starting high school,
navigating new friendships, falling in love for the first
time, learning to live with her splintering family. And,
finally, about the abuse she suffered while May was supposed
to be looking out for her. Only then, once Laurel has
written down the truth about what happened to herself, can
she truly begin to 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 begin
to discover her own path.
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