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. DEAR ZOE 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.
“DEAR ZOE is an almost flawless novel of self-discovery and redemption. It is the sort of book that a generation can call 'theirs,' a book that captures the trials of adolescence and the aching numbness of America in the aftermath of 9/11.”
– THE PRESS OF ATLANTIC CITY