As astonishing as it may seem, the premise of Ann Napolitano’s novel, DEAR EDWARD, comes from a true story --- a 2010 crash of a commercial airplane that killed all aboard…except a young boy.

The book opens with a chapter introducing readers to several of the passengers on what seems like a thoroughly routine flight from Newark to Los Angeles. There’s an elderly millionaire and his wife, a Wall Street genius with an eye for the ladies (and an intermittent cocaine habit), a woman nervously about to disclose her pregnancy to her boyfriend, and another one who believes in reincarnation. And there’s the Adler family, including 12-year-old Edward, his older brother Jordan, and their parents, relocating from the East Coast to Los Angeles for his mother to accelerate her screenwriting career. Thoroughly routine and ordinary --- but by the start of chapter two, more than 190 of those passengers have perished. Only Edward survives.

"...a novel that is simultaneously suspenseful, elegiac and deeply emotionally effective, as the reader’s sympathies are drawn not only toward Edward, the survivor, but also to all those who will not be so lucky."

The remainder of the book alternates chronologies, with one narrative starting after the discovery of Edward’s survival and tracing his path forward, while the other continues the story of those passengers on the flight, leading up to their tragic end. This structural technique creates a novel that is simultaneously suspenseful, elegiac and deeply emotionally effective, as the reader’s sympathies are drawn not only toward Edward, the survivor, but also to all those who will not be so lucky.

Whether Edward is truly lucky at all is, of course, at the heart of his own story. Wracked with grief and guilt over the loss of so much, particularly his idealistic, iconoclastic older brother, Edward approaches his teenage years in a state of profound depression and loneliness, starting his life over at his aunt and uncle’s house in suburban New Jersey, even though he’s not sure what life even looks like anymore.

Edward almost immediately develops an intense friendship with Shay, the lonely and misunderstood girl next door, surviving his darkest moments by sleeping over at her house until her protective mother decides that sharing a bedroom is no longer appropriate for the two young people. He also gradually realizes that his aunt and uncle’s unexpected guardianship coincides with the end of their attempts to have a baby of their own. Surely his presence in their lives can’t begin to compensate for the dreams they have lost.

When, after years of gradual healing helped by the quiet kindnesses of those around him, Edward discovers a duffel bag of letters that his uncle has been hiding from him, he is both shocked and intrigued. These are letters from the friends, family and loved ones of those who had been on that flight with him. Some exhort him to honor their beloved’s memory in some way; some implore him to follow a particular career path or avocation; others are perhaps less charitable but no less confusing. How can Edward --- who also has suffered profound losses of those he loved --- live up to the expectations and hopes placed upon him by other grieving people?

The answers to that question form the novel’s final, bittersweet but thoroughly satisfying section, as Edward, buoyed not only by the sentiments of strangers but also by those who have claimed him as family, surefootedly finds his own way forward out of unimaginable loss and into a future of fulfillment and purpose.