Dear Edward
✒️ Author: Ann Napolitano |. 📖 Published: 2020 | 🗓 Read: June 27, 2020 | 📄 Pages: 352
Summary
What does it mean not just to survive, but to truly live?
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 is a Wall Street wunderkind, a young woman coming to terms with an unexpected pregnancy, an injured vet returning from Afghanistan, a septuagenarian business tycoon, and a free-spirited woman running away from her controlling husband. And then, tragically, the plane crashes. Edward is the sole survivor.
Why You Should Read It
In such a short amount of time, Ann Napolitano does a wonderful job describing the characters on the plane, giving each a unique personality.
Notable Highlights
So much could be solved, she thinks, if we simply held hands with each other more often.
---
Question everything, once you’re grown up and in full command of your powers and no longer living at home, so I don’t have to watch and worry.
---
It feels unkind that they are shoving their emotions at him when his own sadness and fear are so vast that he has to hide from them.
---
There is a note of relief. They have somewhere to start, even if it is the worst place imaginable.
---
He’s looking for the same thing he looks for every minute of every day: opportunities invisible to everyone but himself.
---
Lacey and Jane have different operating systems, which often lands them in trouble. What they care about overlaps, but there are key divergences.
Notes: 1) Description of Adam and I’s relationship.
---
His mood settles like a fine mist over her skin, and she starts to type.
Notes: 1) Good prose.
---
“I just don’t want you to block all the memories out. The fact that they’re good means they’re powerful. We’re building a new foundation here, and if you can let those memories in, and even, at some point, get pleasure from them, they can be bricks in the foundation. Good, solid bricks.”
Notes: 1) Reference to grief and loss. Don't forget.
---
Edward understands—the knowledge arising with a surprising casualness—the real reason he doesn’t sleep in his aunt and uncle’s house. He can’t bear to live with a mother figure, who’s not his mom, and a father figure, who’s not his dad. He had the real thing, and he lost it. Also, it’s too difficult to try to pretend to be John and Lacey’s kid, when their real kids never made it, and he’s not even a kid; he’s something else altogether.
---
Since my father died, I’ve made myself write something every day. I want to make things, not just study them. Ideally, I write a poem, but on the hard days I write correspondence. And today I wrote to you, to connect the living dots between me, my mother, my father, and yourself.
Notes: 1) Grief manifests
---
“I wouldn’t have done that to you”—Edward looks at his uncle and then over at Shay; this applies to her too—“because I know what it’s like to be left behind.”
---
He’s aware of Shay beside him. Her molecules are mixing with his; he’s not just himself; he’s made up of her too. Which means he’s composed of everyone he’s ever touched, everyone he’s ever shaken hands with, hugged, or high-fived. That means he has molecules inside him from his parents and Jordan and everyone else on that plane.
---
He had to carry the burden of so many lost lives. He had to make it up to the people who died. It was him pulling 191 dead people, like a fallen parachute, in his wake. But if the passengers are part of his makeup, and all time and people are interconnected, then the people on the plane exist, just as he exists. The present is infinite, and Flight 2977 flies on, far above him, hidden by clouds.
---
“I used to have this crazy idea…” He pauses. “And I guess I still do, that as long as I stay on the ground, the plane will stay in the sky. It’ll keep flying on its normal route to Los Angeles, and I’m its counterweight. They’re all alive up there, as long as I’m alive down here.”
---
Future-Edward is wearing a handsome tweed blazer, and he’s telling the kids to help others when they need help, and to accept help when they need it themselves.
---
Moonlight beams through his eyelids and he can see, as if it’s the lake in front of him, the pain and loss he’s been swimming in for years. In the moonlight, though, the pain is revealed to be love. The emotions are entwined; they are the two sides of the same gleaming coin.
---
“What happened is baked into your bones, Edward. It lives under your skin. It’s not going away. It’s part of you and will be part of you every moment until you die. What you’ve been working on, since the first time I met you, is learning to live with that.”
---
He knows the loss of Jordan will remain with him forever, even as Edward slowly leaves his parents behind. He was supposed to grow up and leave his mom and dad, after all, just like he will leave John and Lacey in the fall when he goes to college. That is part of the natural order. Edward wasn’t supposed to leave Jordan, though. They were meant to age together. That loss continues to be spiked with pain; it will never be soothed. And he can see, objectively, that Shay’s life without him would have been woven with different moments, friends or lack of friends, different fights with Besa, different books and different struggles.
---
Shay is this Shay because of him. And he is alive—not just surviving, but alive—because of her. He wonders if the scientists who tend to the Large Hadron Collider are hoping to discover not only what happens in the air between two people but how that pressurized air changes those people inside their skin. He hears the science teacher say, The air between us is not empty space.
---