~ Dear Edward, by Ann Napolitano ~
This well-intentioned novel deals with the aftermath of a tragedy — a plane crash in which only one person survives, an 11-year-old boy called Edward.
Edward Adler (known as Eddie), his older brother Jordan, and their parents Bruce and Jane are moving from New York to Los Angeles. Their household belongings are on a truck, and they board a plane at Newark. Somewhere over Colorado, the pilot makes an error and the plane crashes, leaving only Edward alive. After a few weeks in hospital, he goes to live with his aunt and uncle in New Jersey.
Eddie, who now prefers to be known as Edward to (I think) delineate ‘after’ from ‘before’, is in completely understandable shock, largely unresponsive, unable to sleep. He bonds with Shay, a girl of his own age who lives next door, and for a year he is only able to sleep on the floor of her room. His uncle and aunt are also traumatized by grief.
Napolitano decided to alternate chapters between Edward’s life in the present, and the backstories of the Adlers and other passengers on the flight. Edward’s journey works reasonably well, but the detailed (almost minute-by-minute) flight description and backstories were less interesting, and the back-and-forth chapters started to feel tedious.
A sideplot with a luscious flight attendant who has sex in a plane bathroom with a driven workaholic first-class passenger left me feeling that both characters were rather stereotypical and unimaginatively drawn. Three more passengers are described in detail: an elderly billionaire travelling with his nurse; a free-spirit woman who claims to have lived and remembered many lives; and a young woman who has just found that she was pregnant and is flying across the country to (hopefully) get the father of the baby to marry her. None of them were particularly convincing or captivating characters, and they distracted from the better-developed story of Edward’s own growth and coming of age.
The novel’s title refers obliquely to the fascination of the populace and paparazzi with Edward, the lone survivor.
“Several Facebook pages have sprung up, devoted to either the flight or to Edward. There was also a Twitter account called @miracleboy, with Edward’s face as the avatar, but that’s been taken down. […] The content is mostly positive”, [she] says.
“Mostly positive?” Lacey says.
Beyond the media and rubberneckers,
“There are family members,” she continues, “from the other passengers on the plane who wanted to see Edward, but we kept them away.”
“Jesus,” John says. “Why do they want to see him?”
Susan shrugs. “Maybe because Edward was the last one to see their loved ones alive.”
A part of the novel shows Edward’s growing connection to these families, including the unknown girlfriend of his brother Jordan.
Napolitano avoids the trap of being overly dramatic; the events in themselves are quite dramatic enough. Her prose is prosaic, though, and while she is reasonably perceptive, the prose shows no subtlety of language to match. This is a novel in which it is the events that track Edward’s return to normalcy, rather than the language.
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