Books: Dear Edward

“Don’t read Dear Edward on a plane!” a friend warned me. But I’d packed four books for my weeklong trip to Colombia and I’d finished the other three by the time we headed to the airport to go home. So I opened it once I’d checked in and gone through security … and I put it down reluctantly only when I had to.

People who know me know I lost my friend Miriam Wolfe in the 1988 bombing of the commercial airliner Pan Am flight 103. And once I’d processed and accepted her death, I discovered I’m not at all afraid to fly. So reading this entire book in one day as I flew across political borders and a massive body of water and changed planes in a cavernous international airport was concerning only in the fact that I occasionally had to stop to tend to other things on my journey.

I’m saying all of this—if you didn’t already know—because Dear Edward is about a massive commercial plane crash and the recovery journey of its sole survivor, a young boy. And if you can compartmentalize the occurrence of the crash—which author Ann Napolitano describes in almost abstract, clinical imagery because the horror and destruction are obviously part of the narrative but absolutely far from the point—you’ll find a beautifully emotional story about Edward Adler (the young survivor), his extended family, his community and literally the entire country sharing common journeys of grief, healing, support, understanding, magnanimity and ultimately joy.

Napolitano crafts the story in two alternating narratives: the interactions of the passengers and crew before and during the flight, and the interactions of Edward and his slowly expanding world in the days, months and years after the crash.

It’s a smart, effective structure for introducing readers to a number of passengers in small bits of narrative that are memorable and emotionally engaging without being overwhelming. And it works equally well for narrating the early weeks and months of Edward’s recovery, letting readers break through his fogs and reach his new understandings alongside him.

Napolitano has a gift for creating characters both on and off the plane who are archetypal enough to be recognizable and distinctive enough to be singular and memorable. An overwhelmed mother, a lecherous tech bro, a stoic soldier, a delusional romantic, a protective single parent … Napolitano introduces you to these familiar people in small bites and dappled brush strokes and gives them just enough unexpected backstory that you gradually come to know and care for them and become invested in the futures you know—and sometimes don’t know—they have.

And then there’s Edward. He’s a somewhat reserved pre-teen whose entire world is taken from him in an instant … right at the age when he’s already emotionally scattered and filled with insecurities, wonders and growing self-awareness. In lesser hands he could just come off as a mess, but Napolitano takes his hand and ours and walks us together through his anguish and sullenness and anger and hopelessness and discoveries of comfort—along with the misfirings in his pubescent brain—in ways that make him understandable, believable and sympathetic, even through his occasional unwise decisions and hostile behaviors.

Perhaps the most impressive accomplishment of this novel is its thorough plausibility. It could easily drift into the mists of mysticism and magical thinking, but it stays true to the known world from its biggest plot points to the smallest gestures from the periphery characters.

As I’ve shared book recommendations with people, many have praised everything about Dear Edward and a few have said they could never read something so horrifying and heartbreaking. So Dear Edward might not be for you.

But if you’re even slightly intrigued—and if you’ve noticed that I read the entire novel in one day that included two long flights—I think you’ll be as enamored with it, its humanity, its imperfect emotions, its journeys of discovery and love, and its dogged young protagonist as I am.

Books: Monarch

I finished reading Monarch by Candice Wuehle over a week ago and I still don’t know what I think about it. While I was never bored and I regularly found myself eager to find out what happens next in the plot as I read, the book lingers in my brain as just … a lot. A lot of stuff that doesn’t usually go together, which is beautifully creative in itself, but that also doesn’t really connect in any meaningful—or Meaningful—way from an ironic-juxtaposition point of view.

Despite the massive library of books in my mental queue that I want to read, I was swayed by a random woman I encountered on a random scroll through TikTok who gushed so much about this book that I put it at the front of my line. Which is kind of out of character for me and my usual meticulous planning, but it certainly mirrors the abrupt barrages of chaos in the book’s premise.

I hate to give away plot points, but the book cover itself tells you that it’s a story about a young woman who ages out of the world of child beauty pageants and eventually discovers that she and many of her friends/frenemies/competitors on the pageant circuit have all along been sleeper-cell government agents who’ve been programmed to do covert (and never specified) missions that are immediately erased from their memories.

There’s obviously a lot more detail—and plenty of short-lived side plots—to flesh out an entire novel, but the protagonist’s journey of discovery from one world to the other is the only true throughline. And its absurdist connection between the two worlds never quite lands with me.

I worried as I got deeper into the story that it might have feminist-coded undertones that I just wasn’t catching, but aside from the references to the beauty pageants—which are delightfully droll and retrospectively appalling to the protagonist—her personal discoveries and the larger narrative themes are rather universal and arguably gender-neutral.

There are many, many references to circles and spheres and spirals that I worried were elements of symbolism I also wasn’t catching, but the narrator discusses them mostly in reference to the circuitous, slightly-off-linear way she tells her story.

The bulk of the story takes place in an unspecified area of the Midwest that is relatively close to Interstate 80 and Chicago, and at one point it involves a Hy-Vee grocery bag, so I’m guessing it’s in Iowa.

And during college the narrator lives in a dorm called Mayflower that’s pretty far from the campus and that looks over a river and beyond it the school’s fine-arts buildings, all of which sounds a hell of a lot like the University of Iowa. But her Mayflower has a tall bell tower—and it quickly becomes clear that her Mayflower is a metaphoric ship that takes her life to a whole new world. Which is what college obviously does, but for her it starts her journey into the aforementioned plot discombobulations.

On the plus side, Wuehle knows a lot of interesting things about a lot of interesting things, so the book takes you on mini educational journeys through the worlds of cellular preservation, photography and the development of film in darkrooms, makeup (of course), scientific taxonomy, training octopi, academic accreditation, catechismisc theory, and even Norwegian folklore.

And she’s a published poet, which certainly shows in the way she crafts sentences and summons allusions and shapes narrative imagery.

I also seem to be on an unintentional paranormal kick in my recent choices of literature. It’s clearly no secret that the child-beauty-pageant/covert-government-sleeper-agent narrative veers sharply outside the world of realism in the novel, which is all lighthearted fun. But then it VEERS. I powered through the last chapter just to say I’d finished the book.

I’ve been posting reviews of the books I’ve been reading both to help hold myself accountable to my goal to read at least one book a month and to put content on social media and my writing blog that isn’t about the you-know-who shitshow. In my innate need to not come off as mean to my fellow (and clearly more successful) writers, I try to focus on positive things—which I hope I have here—but aside from the novel’s unconventional way of describing how lives and people aren’t always what they seem—even to the people living those lives—I have to say the book is largely perplexing, I’m glad I finished it and I won’t be revisiting it again.

Do with that what you will.