Title/Author: Playlist for the Dead by Michelle Falkoff
Rating: 3 Stars
From Goodreads:
A teenage boy tries to understand his best friend’s suicide by listening to the playlist of songs he left behind in this smart, voice-driven debut novel.
Here’s what Sam knows: There was a party. There was a fight. The next morning, his best friend, Hayden, was dead. And all he left Sam was a playlist of songs, and a suicide note: For Sam—listen and you’ll understand.
As he listens to song after song, Sam tries to face up to what happened the night Hayden killed himself. But it’s only by taking out his earbuds and opening his eyes to the people around him that he will finally be able to piece together his best friend’s story. And maybe have a chance to change his own.
There’s absent parents, grieving teens, a supernatural tangent, a first love, bullying, pretty good nerdiness, glaring factual errors – everything one might need in YA. And I do mean EVERYTHING. Playlist for the Dead had soooo much crammed into one book that it wound up being only pretty good for me. I mean, you don’t need to have every character go through everything to make them fully formed.
The playlist as a whole is a mess, but some of the music is actually pretty good, or at least interesting. The songs tie in to the story well, but if you don’t look at the song at the start of the chapter the name of it might never be mentioned and that was a little confusing sometimes.
The most important lesson Sam learns is that people aren’t just one thing. It takes him a long time to realize this – that even your best friend (who you know better than anyone) might still not have shown you every side of himself. Sam is quick to judge and make assumptions about people, which is kind of annoying, but also true to the nerdiness of his character – if people only see him as a nerd or whatever, then it doesn’t matter if he makes assumptions about the characters that are gay or weird in different ways than he is.
The Perks of Being a Wallflower and The Spectacular Now. I’m way more familiar with Perks, and I think the music and loss is the reason for this comparison. I read The Spectacular Now in 2013 and don’t really remember much about it. Re-reading my review, I can’t draw any comparisons. There is some light teen drinking in Playlist for the Dead, but nothing close to the amount taking place in The Spectacular Now.
Paperback Heart 