Tuesday, January 10, 2023

Review: LOVE LETTERS TO THE DEAD by Ava Dellaira

Rating: 2/5 stars

DNF after 27%.

I stopped on page 70, but then I read the last 16 pages, so altogether I read 27% of the book.

I hardly ever read young adult contemporary stories anymore, but this is one I’ve owned for eight years and I wanted to give it a chance before I give it away. I do enjoy epistolary novels, but that was about the only thing I liked here.

Laurel is given an English assignment to write a letter to a dead person, and she ends up writing a whole book of letters to a whole bunch of dead people, all of them well-known before my time, so while I was familiar with their names, I wasn’t familiar with any of their songs, poems, stories, etc. which led to me having zero attachment to them as characters.

Around page 60, right before I decided I wasn’t going to be finishing this book, I started getting pretty bored. This book is ultimately about dealing with grief as Laurel grieves for her dead sister, and I’ve found that grief is a topic I’m never very interested in reading about. I’m also so over books about high-schoolers drinking and smoking and doing drugs. It’s 100% unrelatable to me and uninteresting to me.

Overall, I’m glad I gave Love Letters to the Dead a chance, but I’m also glad I didn’t read the whole thing, especially after I read the ending and realized I was completely satisfied not knowing what happened in the middle. I’m not really sure what audience would enjoy this book, maybe younger teens dealing with grief? I don’t know, but I do know that it wasn’t for me. 

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