Phillip Beard’s Dear Zoe was an awfully promising, fairly well-reviewed concept - what if someone you love, and, in fact, who you’ve been entrusted to watch over - dies accidentally on September 11. How do you handle the dual grief of the loss and guilt associated with it and of the fact that everyone grieves on that day but not for the person you lost?

The epistle of a novel deals with that concept quite beautifully from time to time, and delves into the standard coming-of-age stuff that any 15-year-old main character should be expected to go through, but the book read unevenly to me. There were individual lines dropped in throughout the story that took my breath away. But for the most part, it was just a same-old, same-old work. Not all that memorable.

On to another coming-of-age novel to close out the goal…