title: Dear Zoe
author: Beard, Philip
description: 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. BACKCOVER: “Like
  The Lovely Bones
  , [
  Dear Zoe
  ] is a piercing look at how family recovers from a devastating loss. Everything about this moving, powerful debut rings true.”
  —
  Booklist
   (starred review)
  “Beard peels away the layers of his protagonist’s anguish simply and sensitively. . . and creates real, multidimensional and affecting characters.”
  —
  The Washington Post
  
  “The whole novel . . . rings with truth.”
  —
  The Buffalo News