5/5 stars(!!)
“I think a lot of people want to be someone, but we are scared that if we try, we won't be as good as everyone imagines we could be.”
What a lovely, aching book. This book broke my heart. It really truly broke my heart. The emotion is palpable throughout all of the pages. This was a reread and I still cried multiple times. I usually don't even cry in books, because there's more of a separation between me and the story, but in Love Letters to the Dead I could just FEEL all the emotions so deeply, like Laurel was some kind of close friend of mine who was hurting so much, and it made me hurt to see her like that.
And this is such a unique concept and way to write a book. The entire book is written as a series of letters that Laurel is writing to dead people, usually people who died young and tragically and hurt a lot in life, like Kurt Cobain and Judy Garland and Amy Winehouse. Laurel's sister, May, died by suicide shortly before the book begins, and so most of the story is her dealing with that and what happened before.
Books written as letters or diaries can be tricky. Sometimes they don't read genuinely as letters or diaries, fading more into first person narration than a diary or letter, with scenes being recounted too exactly and unrealistically. But this was not like that!! Love Letters to the Dead felt like real, authentic letters that Laurel was writing about her life.
And I loved how she talked directly to the people she was writing to! It wasn't just a quirky plot device; the people Laurel was writing to were purposeful choices that reflected how she was feeling. Kurt Cobain was her sister's favorite singer, and like her sister he had committed suicide. May and Laurel were both slightly in love with River Phoenix as kids. Every person she wrote to for a reason, to work through what was happening in her life, and there was a reason for why she was writing to a certain person at each point in the book. Laurel felt like she couldn't really talk to anyone living, so she wrote to people who were dead. And it was beautiful, and heart-wrenching, and devastating.
“I know I wrote letters to people with no address on this earth, I know that you are dead. But I hear you. I hear all of you. We were here. Our lives matter.”
Laurel is 14 in the book, and she FELT 14. She wasn't a child, but not an older teen, and that strange mix of naivety and childishness with maturity and world-weariness was all there in Laurel. She is innocent and naive, but at the same time she has seen a lot and is cynical of people. The writing was lovely, encompassing both sides of Laurel's voice and sounding well-written but still like a 14 year old. Her voice was authentic and young and old and 14 and real.
May, despite being dead the whole book, is one of the most prevalent characters because she is still alive in Laurel's writing and in Laurel's longing for her. Laurel is looking for reasons, for blame, for explanations that aren't there. She is looking for sense in something that is nonsensical. She is trying to figure out how someone as alive and vibrant as her sister can be dead and gone.
“You can be noble and brave and beautiful and still find yourself falling.”
Laurel makes friends - Hannah and Natalie, who are best friends and who love each other but can't accept it or show it publicly. This was a deeply emotional storyline that, just like everything else in this book, was real and beautiful and true. Laurel falls for Sky, a boy who knew her sister, and while their age difference (she was a freshman and he was a junior) was a little weird, that wasn't something that was ignored or brushed off in their relationship. Their age difference was a fundamental aspect of it, and throughout the book I understood their relationship more.
Character development was on point for this whole book. Every single character grew and changed, from Laurel to Sky to Hannah and Natalie, to much more minor characters like Laurel's parents and her Aunt Amy. And the character development was slow and natural and fully believable.
This book has raw emotion from genuine characters that will make you cry softly for a very long time. It has touching ideas about grief, about love, about speaking your truth, and about growing up. It was a compulsively readable and infinitely re-readable story about a girl grieving her sister, and learning how to move on.
“And maybe what growing up really means is knowing that you don't have to be just a character, going whichever way the story says. It's knowing you could be the author instead.”
similar books
Comments