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Dear Edward presents its readers with a moving coming of age that deals with themes of grief, loss, and death. Throughout the course of Edward’s narrative Ann Napolitano depicts the important role that friends and family play in a person’s recovery process.
While I was certainly felt invested in Edward’s story, I found the structure of Napolitano’s novel to be distracting and counterproductive.
Napolitano’s detailed yet slightly cold writing style may not appeal to some readers (it brought to mind Mira T. Lee and Ann Patchett). For the most part I appreciated her exact prose as it presents us with scenes that are both vivid and realistic.
Ordinary moments or motions were often the backdrop to emotionally charged scenes or realisations.
Napolitano also successfully renders the character of Edward, a 12-year old boy who is the sole survivor of a plane crash. Having lost his parents and his brothers, and with the heavy weight of the guilt that comes when you are only one to survive a crash that killed 183 other people, Edward becomes untethered. His ‘new’ life with his aunt and uncle isn’t easy. Suffering from physical wounds, PTSD, and increasingly detached from his own existence, Edward is struggling to find a place in a world that no longer makes sense to him. While he wasn’t the only one to be affected by the crash, the knowledge that he is the ‘sole survivor’ haunts him. Edward no longer feels the drive to do anything: he loses weight, he no longer feels hungry, and he has difficulties sleeping.
Edward’s story was compelling and heart-rendering. There were quite a few jarring scenes, and it wasn’t easy not to feel protective on his behalf as he the adults and kids around him try to make him ‘better’. The idea that anyone can move past something like a plane crash which killed the three people you loved the most in the whole world as well as many others…is madness. Yet, as the years pass, Edward fears that he is the only one who remembers this horrific tragedy.
The presence of his therapist, his aunt and uncle, his neighbours, and later on his school’s president help on his journey of self-recovery. Nevertheless he remains plagued by his sense of guilt and it is only when he comes across some letters addressed to him (as per the title of the novel: ‘Dear Edward’) from the friends, families, and loved ones of those who died on Flight 2977 that Edward begins to believe and envision a future in which he can help others and subsequently himself.
As heart-wrenching as Edward’s story was, the presence of Shay in his life was frustrating. From the first she treats Edward as some sort of oddity. She starts feeding him stories of his being ‘chosen’ by drawing parallels to J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter. Way to make him feel normal or not to blame…
She also often sounded a lot younger than her actual age. The stuff she comes up with was idiotic. I really didn’t see why Edward finds her presence to be so necessary to him. She wasn’t very bright or kind, she mostly tells Edward that she has it worse than him because he is a white and she isn’t and because her mom wants her to wear dresses and behave in an old-fashioned ‘girly’ manner.
The worst thing she says is that he is LUCKY. Like, what-the-actual-fuck.
Here we have this young boy who is detached from his reality, haunted by the deaths of his loved ones, and she tells him he is LUCKY. Because he “can get away with stuff”.
Part of believed that she would be cut out of his life since she is basically poison…but no. She remains a constant, for some bizarre reason I cannot grasp. She was toxic, and it seemed weird that her character would be made to seem as a positive presence in his life. She finds Edward fascinating because of his being a sole survivor. Years later she sort of grows tired of him being still ‘not over it’….young or not she sort of ruined the story for me.
She has one brief redeeming moment at the end of the novel which didn’t make up for her prior behaviour and attitude.
I would have liked this novel a lot more if the narrative had remained focused on Edward rather than jumping back to the Flight 2977. Here we have a very gimmicky jumping into the passenger’s lives, and they all seem to be having a mid-life-crisis or a long moment of introspection/self-analysis on this flight. How likely is it that so many people are reliving their past mistakes and present wants on a flight?
Sadly these characters were mere clichés.
We have the rich-business man with a drug problem, a cranky big-shot who is wheelchair bound and suffering from some form of dementia, the spiritual woman who wears bells on her skirts and exudes mystic vibes, the young woman who just found out she is pregnant, the soldier questioning his sexuality, and the most eye-roll-worthy of the lot: the flight attendant who is pure sex appeal and spends her time sashaying up and down the plane (view spoiler).
As Edward grows into a young adult who is trying to overcome or at least reconcile himself with his trauma, readers are constantly being pulled back into the past.
Given that I felt that Edward was a much more nuanced character than those on the plane, I found these switches to be annoying breaks in his narrative. Maybe they couldn’t have seemed so one-dimensional if we’d seen them prior the flight (so rather than having chapters jumping back to these characters on the plane we could have had chapters showing us a ‘day’ in their lives). Their confinement to this space however didn’t allow for a lot of variation to their thought patterns etc. They sit there and they think of what has led them to this flight. They comment on other passengers, they chat with one another. And in the end they all die.
To me it seemed unnecessary to prolong their deaths…and I would have found it much more impactful if the flight ‘scenes’ had ended at the start of the novel.
While I certainly appreciated the way in which Napolitano’s handles this difficult if not frankly horrific subject manner, I wasn’t very taken by the structure of her novel or by Shay’s characterisation and the role she plays in Edward’s story.
My rating: ★★★✰✰ 3 stars
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