Love Letters to the Dead by Ava Dellaira
Blurb:
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.
In a voice that's as lyrical and as true as a favorite song, Ava Dellaira writes about one girl's journey through life's challenges with a haunting and often heartbreaking beauty.
Review:
It all started with an assignment. The whole book is written in the form of letters to the dead.
This book is about coping with the loss of someone you loved so deeply; trying so hard to fit into a box that the world wants to see us in, that we want to fit in to, but in the end just finding ourselves; and making sense of things when the world doesn't seem to.
It felt like Laurel, by writing letters to the dead and trying to find closure in their demise, thinking about what their lives were like, was trying to make sense of her own world. In the end it felt like she did.
Beautifully written and heartwarming. Just had a little something missing to make it a splendid read.
