Thalia @ Pictures in the Words

I read this book a while ago, but I couldn’t quite put my thoughts into words yet. It made me sad sometimes, but mostly, I think I was bored a large part of the time. Our main character, Laurel, fluctuates between sounding like a ten-year-old wannabe writer, and a trying-too-hard philosophical analyst. I mean, I guess that’s sometimes what we sound like in our journals, or when we write letters, but the flip-flop got to be too much. Laurel never did anything for herself and didn’t have a mind of her own—her two best friends had a deeper story than she did, and I didn’t even think either of them were likable. The subject matter was difficult to handle, but Laurel seemed to feel such little grief for her sister that it was hard to understand where she was coming from. Laurel never turned in her letters until the very end, so I feel like she should have opened up about her real feelings a bit more than she actually did. All in all, I felt like it was kind of a mediocre read, and considering that it was supposed to be deep and nitty gritty; I don’t think it delivered at all.

What I Liked: Spoilers!

• This book was captivating in its own way. I wanted to know what happened to May, and what had happened to Laurel to make her the way she is. Though I wish so much more emotion in the narrative, I can understand why she’s so closed off—her molestation when she was young, by someone her sister trusted to take care of her, explains why she’s so bottled up, even in her own thoughts. I think people who go through things like that and can’t bring themselves to tell anyone don’t like to admit that it actually happened. Laurel beat around the bush for so long in her letters because it’s difficult to admit that she was abused, and the guilt she feels for the part she may have played in her sister’s death was perhaps just too much to acknowledge, even in her deepest heart and thoughts. So while I was frustrated that Laurel was such a closed-off narrator, it made sense. That was the one thing that made this story at all believable for me.

What I Didn’t Like:

• Although I understand why she’s closed off, Laurel also gives an incredibly juvenile narration. All her letters, no matter who they were written to, followed pretty much the exact same outline and pattern. They consisted mostly of what Laurel thought the person was like as a child, how she thought they lived, why they might be the way they were, and then she babbles on and on about her day-to-day life with her friends and new boyfriend, Sky. I guess it’s realistic that a teenager’s journal would be like that, but most of us don’t like reading teenagers’ journals—not even our own sometimes! Plus, the people she was writing to pretty much had nothing to do with the story, so I couldn’t help but wonder why it was written like this at all. Laurel would say things like, “I could see that something in Natalie got crushed. The look on her face was like when you just finished making a waffle in the morning, and you got it out of the toaster, and put the butter and syrup and had it cut along the lines into square inches, and you were carrying it into your room, so excited, but then you dropped it facedown on the floor. And you felt so sad about the whole thing, you didn’t even want to make another.” Okay? Really? I’m supposed to equate this terrible sadness this girl is feeling to dropping a waffle on the floor? I mean, sure, we’ve all had moments were something so stupid makes us want to cry, but it’s not significant. Laurel also says stuff like, “I kept begging myself to move my feet. But I couldn’t. They were stuck. I kept thinking you were waiting for me. There was still a moment. If I could just walk forward, I could reach out and take your hand and pull you back across the tracks to the land. But my body was frozen. I tried with all my strength, but lifting my foot was as hopeless as shoving a mountain. It was the most awful feeling. I was in a panic, trying to get to you.” She may have been in a panic, but she sure does an awful job of showing us her fear and desperation to save her sister—she sounds like a robot who doesn’t know how to use the English language to evoke emotion of any kind. It made her rather un-relatable, like everything had happened to someone else and she was just kind of explaining. Even when she admitted the bad things that had happened to her, you didn’t really…care. That sounds awful, but Laurel never gave me a reason to care. So I didn’t.

Overall: I think there are other books out there that would discuss the same sort of problems, but execute them much better than this one did. Laurel was just unlikable and difficult to understand, although you could excuse some of her behavior. There were a few lines in the book that really stood out to me, since suicide is a big deal to me and holds a very personal place in my heart, but other than those few lines here and there, there wasn’t anything truly remarkable about it. All in all, it was forgettable at best, and I wouldn’t recommend it if you’re looking for something heavier.

(http://thaliasbooks.tumblr.com/post/96680525887/love-letters-to-the-dead-review)