Break out the tissue box! I ripped through Dear Emmie Blue by Lia Louis in a day.
At turns charming and devastatingly sad, it follows Emmie Blue, a teenager who released a balloon with her email address on a card and found a friend an ocean away. Fourteen years later, what started as a lifelong friendship and lifeline for Emmie turns into unrequited love.
She’s wrecked in the opening pages when Lucas asks her to France. She assumes it’s to reveal his feelings and maybe even propose. Instead, he announces he’s getting married and asks her to be Best Woman.
It leaves Emmie at loose ends. Between her absentee mother, the lingering (largely unaddressed) trauma of sexual assault by a teacher in high school, and her lack of career, she’s adrift. As she turns 30 her life is nothing like what she’d hoped for. Lia Louis uses the run-up to the wedding to give Emmie a runway for figuring out who she is, inside and outside her friendship with Lucas and his brother, Elliot.
It’s hard to put into words why I loved this story as much as I did! Maybe it’s the mix CDs and flashbacks to Emmie and Lucas’ early friendship. Maybe it’s because Emmie isn’t as alone as she thinks she is or that the realization is, sometimes you can’t see what or who is right in front of your face.
While it feels like there are a lot of books about young British women foundering in their early 30s, Louis has crafted a main character it’s impossible not to empathize with. You’re rooting for Emmie from the get-go. While there were a lot of tears for me with this one, in the end, they were happy ones.
The assault looms large in her life and while it’s well-handled for the most part, and never feels like a plot device, I just wish Emmie would have gotten some therapy.
Ideal for fans of Mhairi McFarlane, especially if you loved Don’t You Forget About Me (which I did, soooooo much).
CW: sexual assault, victim blaming, narcissistic absentee parent, character with cancer
Dear Emmie Blue is out on Tuesday, July 14. Get it at The Ripped Bodice | Bookshop.org | IndieBound | Amazon | Apple Books
4 stars