Dear Zoe Paperback – April 25, 2006 by Philip Beard

Description

Philip Beard’s stunning debut novel is fifteen-year-old Tess DeNunzio’s letter to her sister, Zoe, lost to a hit-and-run driver on a day when it seemed that nothing mattered but the tragedies playing out in New York and Washington. Dear Zoe is a remarkable study of grief, adolescence, and healing with a pitch-perfect narrator who is at once sharp and naïve, world- worried and self-centered, funny and heartbreakingly honest. Tess begins her letter to Zoe as a means of figuring out her own life, her place in the world, but the result is a novel of rare power and grace that tells us much about ours. BACKCOVER: “Like The Lovely Bones, [ Dear Zoe] is a piercing look at how family recovers from a devastating loss. Everything about this moving, powerful debut rings true.”
— Booklist (starred review)”Beard peels away the layers of his protagonist’s anguish simply and sensitively. . . and creates real, multidimensional and affecting characters.”
— The Washington Post“The whole novel . . . rings with truth.”
— The Buffalo News