DEAR EDWARD ★★★★ Ann Napolitano
Viking, £12.99
ON JUNE 12, 2013, the Alder family are about to board flight 2977 from New York to Los Angeles. Mum Jane and dad Bruce watch with a mixture of anxiety, exasperation and pride as their stroppy 15-year-old son Jordan refuses to go through the scanner and is instead patted down by the security guard, as younger brother Eddie, 12, watches in admiration. They bustle to their seats.
Jane is in first class because she has work to finish. Seated nearby are an angry, aggressive billionaire who is slowly dying of cancer and an investment banker who’s kicked a cocaine habit and has his eye on beautiful flight attendant, Veronica.
Bruce, Jordan and Eddie are back in coach class, laughing, fighting and fidgeting. They’re seated near Linda, who thinks she’s pregnant and is hoping from the bottom of her fragile heart that her boyfriend is going to propose. Next to her is Florida, who believes in reincarnation and is escaping a suffocating marriage. And then there is injured soldier Benjamin, who’s remembering everything his grandmother did for him in the past and is planning on spending more time with her when he gets home.
All of these passengers, restless in their seats and alive with hopes and dreams, are planning out their futures, futures that will never come to fruition. Six hours later, the plane crashes, killing everybody on board except for Eddie.
Taken in by his mother’s sister and her husband, and renaming himself Edward, the bereaved boy is a shell of the buoyant, optimistic child he used to be.
Numb with grief and disbelief, unable to sleep, feeling guilty for being alive and missing his brother so much he doesn’t know what to do with himself, Edward attempts to remember how to live, how to fit in his own skin again.
Despite his overwhelming grief, he forms a friendship with a neighbour, the impetuous Shay; he waters the plants in his headmaster’s office; talks to his therapist and attempts to come to terms with the trauma.
But he only truly begins to heal when he and Shay discover a cache of letters, hidden by Edward’s protective uncle.The letters are from the families of the other passengers and Edward grasps that he gets to live the life their loved ones never will, a realisation that helps him to progress on his heartbreaking emotional journey.