Review: Playlist for the Dead

Playlist for the Dead
Author: Michelle Falkoff
Publication Date: January 27th 2015        
Publisher: HarperTeen
~A copy was provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review~ 

 

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.

WHY ARE THESE ONES SO HARD TO REVIEW?

So I'll get straight to the point.

I didn't love it.

I didn't hate it.

Again, I'm in middle ground territory and I freaking hate that, and the fact that I so wanted to love it, it's very music orientated as well, and come on, that's perfect for me, which makes me dislike it more because I didn't love it. But, that's not down to the story, or the message behind the story.
It's down to the characters.

Because these characters. Ugh. Okay, Sam wasn't so bad, he was an okay narrator and he's feeling what anyone would feel with what happened. He feels angry and guilty, he's easy to read and he's not hard to like. But hard to connect to.

The said friend that killed him, however? Hayden was not easy to like. At all. You should feel sorry for him, right? With what he had to live with, with what he had to put up with, but the more we got to know him through Sam, through conversations they had, he more I started to dislike him. He came off as harsh, and in some places, an idealist. I know Sam said that their arguments were fun, that Hayden took it way too serious, and maybe he took them way too serious because he was trying to put his ideals onto Sam. He had no control in his life in any way-bar the one way he found, his choice to take his own life- that he had to control something and when Sam didn't like something he did-or not as much, he got mad. See? Maybe I'm wrong, maybe it's just me, but I didn't like the guy.

And then we have Astrid. Astrid, Astrid, Astrid, I didn't like her one bit either, she came across as false to me, and although there is a reason for that, the issue was she was supposed to be genuine with Sam, but for me, it didn't come off that way, every other character apart from Sam himself seemed 2D, which...made the romance a bit...meh, too. Didn't feel anything between them, though they did have things in common, and there was a whole lot of almost I love you-I've never felt like this before- you get me- type of insta-love going on. So I didn't really care where that went.

I enjoyed Playlist for the Dead, but when I compare it to a similar one I've read this year, it didn't give me the same emotion or closure that I Was Here did.

Rating: 3/5