From Barnes & NobleLove Letters to the Dead melds two of my favorite tough-stuff young adult novels, The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky, and Jay Asher's Thirteen Reasons Why. Those two stories are told from a teenage boy's perceptive, while Love Letters features Laurel, a girl who lives out her freshman year through a series of letters to deceased famous people from Judy Garland to Jim Morrison; to Kurt Cobain and Janis Joplin. The coming-of-age story covers a gamut of real-world stuff all at once, including same-sex relationships, rape, suicide, first love and divorce. Despite the seriousness, the book does hit the challenge of teenage stories being told from the voice of an adult: Even the tough stuff is told from a romantic, John Hughes-movie magical viewpoint that left me thinking, "Were my high school years really that interesting?" Without spoiling the story, Laurel's final letter is not to a famous person, but to the number one star in her life who started the entire project.
