Dear Zoe
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. <i>Dear Zoe</i> 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 <i>The Lovely Bones</i>, [<i>Dear Zoe</i>] is a piercing look at how family recovers from a devastating loss. Everything about this moving, powerful debut rings true.â€<br />—<i>Booklist</i> (starred review) <br /><br />“Beard peels away the layers of his protagonist’s anguish simply and sensitively. . . and creates real, multidimensional and affecting characters.â€<br />—<i>The Washington Post</i> <br /><br />“The whole novel . . . rings with truth.â€<br />—<i>The Buffalo News</i>