This book was suggested to me a few years ago via Stephen Chbosky's Goodreads account. It caught my eye in the library a few days ago and figured I might as well give it a shot....
Eh.
It was good, but not exactly memorable.
Starting a new school is hard; it's even harder after your sister has died.
Laurel is starting high school, trying to find herself, and forget about everything that's happened in the past.
The death of her best friend, role model, and older sister May, really messed Laurel up. She feels guilty about her death (which is super annoying because we don't find out what happened until the last 100 pages).
Mrs. Buster gives an assignment to write a letter to a dead person.
Obviously Laurel should have written to her sister, but instead decides to write to Kurt Cobain, Amy Winehouse, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Judy Garland, and many others. She's almost using these letters as a diary of sorts, a way to get everything off her chest. She chose these people because she feels like they might understand what she's going through. She can relate to the things they're singing about, the movies they're in, and her love for them.
But what she doesn't realize is how tragic their lives really were...
She doesn't grasp the reasons they aren't here anymore.
She tries, she really, really does. But she just seemed so shallow about the whole thing.
The most annoying thing to me was that in each letter she re-describes some aspect of their life, THAT SHE'S ALREADY MENTIONED IN A PREVIOUS LETTER.
This was such a sad book to read, but not in the bawling my eyes out way, but in the tragedy of it.
Shit got tough for Laurel and she didn't handle it very well.
None of the teens in the book handled their problems very well, if we're being honest.
I mean, this book was written in 2014....
I just felt like this had a very '70s type vibe to the way the characters were portrayed.
Now that may just be where my mind took it but regardless I wasn't thrilled with this book at all.
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