Ava Mascuch 808

“Love Letters to the Dead”

Have you ever love someone so much that you felt lost without them when they passed away?  In the book, “Love Letters to the Dead,” by Ava Dellaria the main character Laurel knows exactly how that feels. In the story Laurel struggles with her older sister’s passing in order to deal with it she writes love letters to famous people who have passed away. She writes to them about her new school, her friendships, falling in love for the first time and dealing with the grief of her sister May dying. In the beginning of the book Laurel is lost and she doesn’t know who she is anymore without May, and she can’t find her path. As the book goes on she realizes she can’t ignore what happened to her and she can’t be May, she has to be her own person and move on.

In the beginning Laurel can’t find her way. She is in a new school so she decides to act like her, fun, dangerous, and outgoing sister May.  When Laurel enters her new school she is shy at first but then decides not to hold back and  becomes friends with Hannah and Natalie. They  go to parties together and get drunk, she smokes, takes shots, and turns into a different person. She would have never done this in the past but she keeps telling herself, “This is what May would have done.” This isn’t good because in Laurel’s eyes May could do no wrong, she was just her beautiful, adventurous older sister and Laurel wanted to be exactly like her, but May was deeply flawed. Once Laurel was at a party and a boy came up to her and told her to take a “party pill,” she knew it wasn’t the right idea and she wasn’t going to do it but then someone said, “May would have done it,” and with that she took the pill and almost got rapped. This shows that acting like May wasn’t going to change the fact that she was gone. Even when May was alive Laurel would jump at the chance to be like her or hang out with her. So when May said to Laurel we should go to the movies Laurel immediately agreed. It turned out May was using her to hang out with her older forbidden  boyfriend and she would leave Laurel with Billy, who would drive away with Laurel, park somewhere and molest her even though they were supposed to go to the movies. This proves that whenever Laurel was acting like May or wanted to be with her it would just cause her pain. When Laurel would pretend to be someone she wasn’t she lost her, judgement, her boyfriend Skye, her friends, and who she really was.

In the end Laurel realizes that in order to move on she had to be herself and not her sister, and come to terms with the fact that May was flawed and she made mistakes just like everyone else.

When she started to act like herself her friends and boyfriend loved her even more because they 

knew this is who she truly was. People everywhere who are dealing with loss especially at a young 

age should read this book because it shows you that everyone deals with loss in their own way and 

they are not alone.