Book in Review: Playlist for the Dead by Michelle Falkoff

2015 releases
Title: Playlist for the Dead
Author: Michelle Falkoff
Publishing Date: January 27th, 2015
Publisher: HarperTeen
Format: ARC
Rating: 1/5 star

Summary:

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.

Part mystery, part love story, and part coming-of-age tale in the vein of Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower and Tim Tharp’s The Spectacular Now, Playlist for the Dead is an honest and gut-wrenching first novel about loss, rage, what it feels like to outgrow a friendship that's always defined you—and the struggle to redefine yourself. But above all, it's about finding hope when hope seems like the hardest thing to find.

This book compares itself to Stephen Chbosky's The Perks of Being a Wallflower and Tim Tharp's The Spectacular Now. These are really big claims, and I was at first skeptical, naturally, but in the end I decided to give this a try. While I did not exactly like The Spectacular Now all that much, I did adore Perks a lot, and so I had great expectations for this book. Sadly, it was so different from what I expected and I'm really really disappointed with how this book turned out.

It's sad because there isn't really anything in particular that I would want to point out or rant about with this book. I just felt so unattached to it, and the whole time I was reading this I just had this meh look on my face, like I totally did not care for the characters or the story at all. This book could have had really great potential but it so lacks the emotional depth that I was looking for. For a story that tackles themes of death, suicide and love, it really fell short for me.