Love Letters to the Dead
A Novel
Square Fish · Print & ebook · September 29, 2015
“Dear Ava, I loved your book.” —Award-winning actress Emma Watson For fans of Kathleen Glasgow and Amber Smith, Ava Dellaira writes about grief, love, and family with a haunting and often heartbreaking beauty in this emotionally stirring, critically acclaimed debut novel, Love Letters to the Dead.
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- Who it’s for
- Letters make grief feel intimate, while family fractures and first love keep the emotional world unsettled.
- Themes
- Grief and loss, Family relationships, Abuse and healing
- Genres
- Surviving Sexual Abuse, Death & Grief for Teens, Coming of Age
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For younger readers: If You Read This
For older readers: The Wish, The Last Letter
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Start with this bookAbout this book
“Dear Ava, I loved your book.” —Award-winning actress Emma Watson For fans of Kathleen Glasgow and Amber Smith, Ava Dellaira writes about grief, love, and family with a haunting and often heartbreaking beauty in this emotionally stirring, critically acclaimed debut novel, Love Letters to the Dead. 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.
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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.
Letters Through Grief
Letters make grief feel intimate, while family fractures and first love keep the emotional world unsettled.
Come here for
- An intimate letter-shaped voice on grief, first love, and family
- Letters addressed to artists and other figures who died young
Expect
- A personal, confessional reading experience
- A painful reckoning with loss, abuse, and family complexity
Where it sits
| Death & Grief for Teens | 53% |
|---|---|
| Coming of Age | 47% |
| Surviving Sexual Abuse | 38% |
Percentages are BookFrontier’s reading of the book.
Publisher categories
- YA Sibling Stories
- Death & Grief for Teens
- Emotions & Feelings for Teens
- Authors
- Ava Dellaira
- Publisher
- Square Fish
- Published
- September 29, 2015
- Format
- Print & ebook
- Theme
- Grief and loss · Family relationships · Abuse and healing
- Reading lane
- YA Sibling Stories