Dead Letters by Caite Dolan-Leach

Overall this book was ok-probably hovering somewhere just north of a 5 “good enough” with one huge caveat:  it could have used a stronger editor.  When a book has glaring enough inconsistencies and errors to take me out of the story, I start to get irritated.  When it does it over and over, I start to lose faith.  I love to just sink into a story and forget about life for a while…hard to do when you keep saying to yourself “that doesn’t make any sense!” as you are reading.  

Bummer, because this was otherwise a likeable story.  Part mystery, part family drama, the protagonist and her twin sister were interesting characters and the story had legs, it just fell apart for me a little in the telling.  Examples:  At one point our heroine (if she really is such) dons a bikini and then proceeds to undress down to her underwear…and I know it sounds petty but there was a whole lead up to her wearing the bathing suit to begin with and a whole discussion of her still having it on, so why have her all of the sudden wearing real clothes that she has to take off in order to go to bed??…8 year old girls go downstairs to research how to care for baby mice on the internet…circa 2000 when there was barely an internet, and certainly there was not one that 8 year kids were accessing from their kitchen…and a dock in upstate NY was described as being in place in the middle of winter, giving one who walked to the end of it a feeling of being in the middle of the North Pole…when anyone who has lived through a winter in the great north knows that all docks are brought in for the winter because otherwise the snow and ice would destroy them year after year…and the mom is described happily watching Netflix on someone’s old computer hour after hour as her main pasttime…but then our main character gives her mother her own computer so she can watch Nexflix and hopes the mom “can figure it out”…why would she need to, if she already has a laptop and regularly watches Nexflix on it?

The story was ok, a little farfetched in terms of the “dead” sister’s ability to foresee how and when certain things would play out but that doesn’t really bother me…that’s part of the fun of reading a novel versus having to deal with real life.  The capricious details?  Too many, too often to make this book a real contender for a decent rating. 

Rating:  #6 Bearable, Just Barely