Status
Available
Call number
Genres
Collection
Publication
New York : Dial Press, [2020]
Description
"One summer morning, twelve-year-old Edward Adler, his beloved older brother, his parents, and 183 other passengers board a flight in Newark headed for Los Angeles. Among them are a Wall Street wunderkind, a young woman coming to terms with an unexpected pregnancy, an injured veteran returning from Afghanistan, a business tycoon, and a free-spirited woman running away from her controlling husband. Halfway across the country, the plane crashes. Edward is the sole survivor. Edward's story captures the attention of the nation, but he struggles to find a place in a world without his family. He continues to feel that a part of himself has been left in the sky, forever tied to the plane and all of his fellow passengers. But then he makes an unexpected discovery--one that will lead him to the answers of some of life's most profound questions: When you've lost everything, how do you find the strength to put one foot in front of the other? How do you learn to feel safe again? How do you find meaning in your life?" --… (more)
Media reviews
Children read fairy tales to master terror, and perhaps adults do the same with disaster books. More and more, histrionics seem to fill our days, with disasters of all types — political, natural, genocidal, technological — populating our social-media feeds. While none of the adults in either
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the real crash or the novel it inspired survive, Napolitano’s fearless examination of what took place models a way forward for all of us. She takes care not to sensationalize, presenting even the most harrowing scenes in graceful, understated prose, and gives us a powerful book about living a meaningful life during the most difficult of times. Show Less
Dear Edward isn’t a page turner with cliffhangers at the end of every chapter. Instead it’s a slow burn that draws you in to Edward’s interior life, the melancholia of his loss and of the fractured lives around him. Years after the crash, Edward’s healing begins to accelerate when he finds
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bags of unopened letters from the crash victims’ families. He is able to empathize and grieve with them, and so come to terms with his own loss.
It’s hard for a novel to thoroughly capture a reader’s attention while simultaneously meditating on profoundly complex issues. In Dear Edward, Napolitano, a creative writing professor in New York and author of two previous novels, including A Good Hard Look, manages to achieve this. The delicate sparseness of her prose slowly peels back the layers to reveal a warm, fulfilling center that is a true reward for readers. Show Less
Napolitano, the associate editor of One Story magazine, has written a novel about the peculiar challenges of surviving a public disaster in the modern age. She shows with bracing clarity just how cable news and social media magnify misery and exposure as never before. Edward awakens in the hospital
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as the world’s most famous orphan. Broken and terrified, he must immediately shoulder a weird blend of trauma and adulation.... it’s a strange girl named Shay who really leavens the novel. With Shay, Napolitano captures the authentic quirkiness of a precocious adolescent. She lives next door to Edward’s aunt and uncle, and from the start she’s the only person who speaks to Edward with complete and cleansing candor.... She provides exactly the atmosphere of clarity that this fractured boy needs to rebuild his life, and watching them do that together is one of the most touching stories you’re likely to read in the new year. Show Less
For some readers, Napolitano’s premise will be too dark to bear, underlining our terrible vulnerability to random events and our inability to protect ourselves or our children from the worst-case scenario while also imagining in exhaustive detail the bleak experience of survival. The people
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around Edward have no idea how to deal with him; his aunt and uncle try their best to protect him from the horrors of his instant celebrity as Miracle Boy. As one might expect, there is a ray of light for Edward at the end of the tunnel, and for hardier readers this will make Napolitano’s novel a story of hope.
Well-written and insightful but so heartbreaking that it raises the question of what a reader is looking for in fiction. Show Less
Napolitano (A Good Hard Look) builds a gentle but persistent tension as she navigates the minds of passengers on a plane that is about to crash, and the thoughts of the boy who is the only survivor. Wonderfully detailed characters include Edward Adler, 12 years old at the time of the crash, who
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lives through the catastrophe, and Shay, who’s the same age and lives next to the aunt and uncle who take over for Edward’s dead parents. The story moves back and forth before and after the crash, when Edward struggles to physically and emotionally recover....Napolitano’s depiction of the nuances of post-trauma experiences is fearless, compassionate, and insightful. Show Less
Awards
Read with Jenna (2020-01 — 2020)
LibraryReads (Annual Voter Favorite — January 2020)