Book Club Recap: Dear Edward by Ann Napolitano
Dear Lovers, Haters, and Nitpickers!
…Or should I only say, Dear Lovers? Because it seems that our March book club pick was unanimously loved.
What a beautiful, deep, and resonant book it was—and what accomplished and complex writing!
We have so much to learn from this book as writers, and I’m excited to dive in!
Structure
This novel is a perfect example of structure being tailor-made to make the story shine.
When considered linearly, the events of this story are pretty straightforward: a bunch of people board the plane, the plane crashes, and there’s a sole survivor whose life, from then on, we follow.
But instead of telling this story in a linear fashion, the author divides it into two timelines: the first one—the events on the plane, culminating in the crash; and the second one—following the sole survivor’s grieving process afterwards.
Both timelines run throughout the novel—side by side, and it’s actually a perfect choice in more ways than one. In the first half of the book, Edward’s timeline is packed with grief and loss, while the airplane timeline is a bit quieter, offering insights into the passengers’ lives—and a bit of respite from the intense feelings in Edward’s timeline. In the second half of the book, as Edward is getting better, the airplane timeline picks up on dramatic effect—as the time of the crash nears. In entirety, these two timelines balance each other beautifully, keeping the pacing and level of engagement consistent throughout the novel (although there were members who thought the middle could have been more succinct).
Balancing the timelines
Both timelines roughly got similar page-time. In the first part of the novel, there was a bit more emphasis on Edward’s coping with the accident, while in the plane we were slowly getting familiar with the Adler family, and several other characters.
Some members felt like there were too many point-of-view characters on the plane (six, in addition to the Adlers); and suggested that, instead of following so many disparate, unconnected people, it might have been more impactful to see a bit more about Edward’s family, their backstory and the constellation of their relationships.
Others agreed that the Adlers were a normal, average nuclear family and that adding more of their backstory wouldn’t have added much to the story; whereas listening to all the stories of the additional passengers paid off later on, when the letters started arriving. In other words, their stories had served a set up for when Edward started receiving letters from the family members—giving the letters additional meaning and depth they would’ve lacked had we not met these people.
Omniscient POV
The book opens with the scene in the airport, when the Adler family is boarding the plane along with the other passengers who we’ll get to know over the course of the book. Several of our members agreed that the writing in this first chapter would technically be considered head-hopping.
The omniscient POV is only done well when it adheres to certain rules. While the omniscient narrator can know thoughts of every character on the page, he is not allowed to convey every character’s thoughts and feelings paragraph-for-paragraph, because it becomes confusing for the reader. And it is exactly what the author did: she jumped from Jordan’s perspective to Bruce’s, to Edward’s, to Jane’s, to Crispin’s to Benjamin’s… without scene breaks, and for a lot of us, this was hard to follow, and it was hard to get invested in a particular character because you kept shifting skins. What made it even harder is that, as she shifted from character to character, the author relayed their deepest feelings and thoughts (like when Jane Adler feels sadness for Eddie dropping her hand).
However, in the following chapter (the scene after the crash), the narrator’s voice becomes so distinct that, throughout the rest of the story, none of us had issues with the omniscient POV. And, in hindsight, we agreed that the first chapter couldn’t have been told in any other way. After reading the whole book, even that first chapter feels less like headhopping; it’s just a matter of getting accustomed to the author’s way of storytelling (and the narrator’s distinct voice).
The hook and the narrative drive
When we discussed the slightly jarring head-hopping in the first chapter, and how difficult it was to get a hang of the omniscient narration, one member said: “You can get a way with a lot of things if you have a hook as strong as this one.” The hook she had in mind was the plane crash, of course, which makes you want to—need to—read on.
This method of creating narrative drive is called dramatic irony. The author places the reader in the “dread” position. The reader knows what will happen (plane will crash) before the character does. The source of tension comes from dreading HOW this will happen—how the character will react (or not react).
The airplane timeline picks up tension as the time of the crash approaches and keeps you glued to the pages—despite knowing that the plane will crash.
In Edward’s timeline, the narrative drive (the need to turn the page) comes from the concern and curiosity about how Edward will deal will the aftermath of the plane crash—propelled with the main story question: Will Edward be ok?
But more on that later on.
Narrative distance
One of the fears I had when I realized the story was told in omniscient POV, was that there will be a lot of narrative distance. This is, after all, the usual side-effect of omniscient POV: the fact that there’s a narrator telling us how the character feels or thinks, instead of character just feeling and thinking often creates a distance between the reader and the protagonist. You are not inside the protagonist’s mind and body; you are one-step removed from them.
Deep POV has become the norm in modern storytelling, and most readers expect this immersive experience, and are jarred by the distance, so I was worried this book won’t make me feel as much as I have grown accustomed to feel when reading.
In one of the other books with the omniscient narrator we’ve read for our book club (The Vanishing Half), there was a lot of distance, which was a price the author paid to be able to cover the bigger picture (to be able to show the lives of all the characters over the course of several decades, she had to zoom out on their interiority, so using the omniscient was a conscious concession to doing justice to the overall story).
That distance we’ve come to expect with omniscient storytelling, though, was virtually non-existent in Dear Edward.
For me, at least, it came as a huge surprise, and is the biggest asset of this book: the storytelling is so well done, I felt more by reading this book than many others told in the deepest of the Deep POV. And that’s because the author made sure she got the emotions onto the page.
Getting emotions onto the page
If we took a step back, to before reading this book, I think most of us would’ve expected the author to convey A LOT of emotions onto the page in classic ways; most of writers would resort to using typical emotions a person might feel after surving—and losing an entire family—in a plane crash (sadness, grief) and couple that with typical expressions of those emotions (crying, tears, staring into the distance)…
Ann Napolitano did none of that.
In fact, she did the opposite: she reduced the number of times those typical emotions and expressions of those emotions are mentioned on a page, to a minimum. After losing his entire family in a plane crash, Edward cried a total of two times—one of which he didn’t even consciously cry but noticed tears falling on his arms. The word ‘sadness’ is mentioned maybe a couple of times. What the author did here was the equivalent of riding a horse without a saddle and with one hand tied behind her hand, blindfolded.
And it is the single best decision (among many other fantastic decisions) she made.
In absence of what you might expect (the overwhelming sadness, bouts of crying, snuggling to his aunt for support) the author actually gave this part of the book an amazing narrative drive. Narrative drive is fueled by either concern or curiosity (actually, both to a degree), and with knowing the plane crashed—the curiosity is out of the picture. So what is propelling you to read on if the curiosity is nipped in the bud? The unexpected way of depicting Edward’s healing process is what made me turn the pages—it made me curious to see what will happen next. In other words, the author wrote about grief in such an unexpected ways it not only made me concerned for Edward—it also made me curious.
Here are some other things our members noted as well-done when writing emotions:
SHOWING—REALLY SHOWING—EMOTIONS
This book is a masterclass when it comes to showing emotions. Most times, when the show vs. tell rule is explained to us, we’ll hear: Don’t tell me the character is sad. Show the sadness. Most times, the showing is misinterpreted—or at least understood only on surface level: instead of showing the character is sad, show them crying. Why? Because tears are a universal sign of sadness, and having them cry will make it obvious to the reader that it is, in fact, sadness the character’s feeling.
Showing, however, can be understood in a much deeper way, which is what Ann Napolitano does in this book. She is not just showing us the surface level emotion—sure Edward is sad, that’s a no-brainer—but also showing us what sadness exactly is, where Edward is concerned. She shows us that, to him, it means feeling displaced. Not being able to sleep anywhere but in Shay’s room, even though he can’t explain why. Not being able to eat. Not being able to sleep in the nursery. Dreading turning Jordan’s age. Wearing Jordan’s clothes. Assuming a completely other identity to the one he’d had before his family died. “Eddie was musical. Edward isn’t.”
USING RESTRAINT TO AMPLIFY EMOTIONAL IMPACT
There were members who wondered if it was strange that Edward and his aunt and uncle never hugged or snuggled. After discussing, most of us agreed this, among other—similar—ways of showing restraint, was a brilliant choice.
The author often used this kind of restraint: no grand emotional responses or grand gestures where you expected one (like, when Edward raises a glass in his graduation dinner, and says—merely, ”Thank you.” That thank you packs such a punch. And there isn’t an assembly of words he could’ve said in this place that would ever be perfect enough. Instead, the author leaves it to our imagination, thus amplifying the impact and resonance of these two words.
BEING SPECIFIC
Only writers know how hard it is to create something out of nothing. How hard it is to write vivid characters and their internal worlds by using your thoughts and imagination alone. So, in our struggle, we often resort to the usual, the expected, the well-known.
This book tells you just how important it is to really make everything as specific as you can.
Imagining a school principal is a general category. Imagining a school principal with love of ferns—not any ferns at that, but those that thrive on the East Coast—is much more like it. Making the ferns a tool of showing the growing connection, mutual loss, and shared traumatization—is brilliant.
The story is in the specifics. And the author made sure she capitalized on that. Each of the scenes in Edward’s timeline doesn’t dwell on his emotions in general. It chooses one slice of his life (watching General Hospital, sleeping at Shay’s, observing his aunt and uncle fight, taking care of those ferns), and through that slice—depicts his state of mind with scalpel precision.
UNEXPECTED TURNS OF EVENTS; SHIFTS OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Another way to deepen our understanding of Edward’s grief was shown by him, suddenly starting to see things with different eyes. For instance, after Shay kicked him out of her room, he began thinking their friendship is over. Every single (yet specific!) event they went through reinforced this fear and belief—and the reader implicitly trusted Edward’s interpretation of these events. Until the night he called her to read the letters in the garage with him, and she disclosed how abandoned by him she felt. In that moment he becomes aware that it was HIM who pushed her away, not the other way around. And this shift in consciousness—in turn—only serves to show his grief.
How much better is this—how much more effective—than just showing this boy crying himself to sleep each night?
USING MASLOW’S HYERARCHY OF NEEDS TO DEPICT GRIEF
Usually, when writers write grief, they rely on the five stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance) to get that emotion across. Ann Napolitano used a different approach: in one of her interviews, she said that after a lot of trials and errors, she resorted to Maslow’s Hyerarchy of needs to depict Edward’s grieving process.
In her interview for BookPage, Napolitano says:
Edward’s first year after the crash, which takes place in part one of the book, felt very clear to me from the start. His focus was on physical survival: Could he eat, could he walk, could he sleep? After his first year, though, I struggled with his chapters. The possibilities for his forward motion felt infinite, and in fact there’s a version of the book in which we see Edward’s entire life, ending when he’s about 75 years old. Eventually (like, after five years of writing), I decided to align his recovery with the psychological framework known as Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. The hierarchy is shaped like a triangle, and the bottom, largest “need” is for survival, shelter, food and water. It narrows gradually through the need for safety, then love and belonging, then esteem and finally self-actualization. I used these stages as reference points as Edward grew, grieved and healed.
A lot of us agreed this was a perfect choice.
Edward’s characterization
One interesting question raised during the book club meeting was if the members felt that Edward was in the autistic disorder spectrum. Many members felt that he exhibited some of the tell-tale signs (love of math, being cerebral, overly-mature, socially distant), but others felt that it was just a matter of him being homeschooled by an equally cerebral father who encouraged critical thinking and love of math; his good manners—and the aftermath of the terrible trauma he’s gone through.
Another question raised was if the fact that Edward and Shay didn’t act like hormonal teenagers was believable. Most of us agreed that, given the nature of his trauma, he wouldn’t be putting the focus and emphasis on exploring sexuality that a normal teenager would.
Again, it’s interesting to hear author’s words on the subject of Edward’s characterization. From her interview for BookPage:
Q: Edward is filled with decency. He refuses to cash the check that’s given to him, he’s horrified when Shay’s mother suspects he’s been sleeping with her daughter, and he rejects some undoubtedly excellent universities because he wants to remain with Shay. His moral compass is unwavering. Were there other versions of Edward in which he wasn’t so upstanding?
A: Hm. No. There were other versions in which Edward was more boring, though. I wanted to write a book about kind people maneuvering a terrible situation. I had no interest in Edward being immoral, and he felt so soaked in sadness that true anger or rage felt inaccessible from inside him. In the weakest/worst drafts, Edward was too muted, though, and too passive. I had to fight to bring him to his own surface, in order for him to show up in his new life.
Characterization of the people on the plane
One of the most amazing things as you read this book is just how deftly the author is able to set forth the layers of these different personalities each time they are given a chapter. It’s like the reversal of peeling layers off an onion—with each little snapshot of their lives, she builds these characters more and more, each time using pertinent, specific information to bring them to life.
We learned from her interview that, before she started writing this book, Napolitano had first taken notes for a year. She chose the six characters on the plane to follow (Lassio, Cox, Veronica, Laura, Florida, Benjamin) and took time to build them from the ground up—by reading billionaire’s biography, looking into warfare and soldier life, etc. When she started writing, she already knew how to layer them—so no wonder that each snippet on each of these characters felt to the point, life-like and—in hindsight—true-to-character. Still, I think this shows an incredible skill that many writers struggle to replicate.
With that, I’ll wrap up this month’s book club recap, although there is certainly more to be said on this wonderful, resonant book. Hope you enjoyed reading! Until next time—keep safe and keep writing!
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Have you read this book? Did you like it? Let me know your thoughts in the comments!
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