Thirteen Reasons Why meets The Perks of Being a Wallflower: Playlist for the Dead by Michelle Falkoff

Playlist for the Dead
by Michelle Falkoff

Genre: Music, Romance, Contemporary, Young Adult
Release Date: January 27, 2015
Publisher: HarperTeen
Source: ARC from HarperCollins and NBS! 
Links: Goodreads | Amazon | iBooks

SYNOPSIS

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.

REVIEW

"And ultimately Hayden was the one who'd made the decision. He was the one who'd left us here, trying to figure it out, never able to say we were sorry, to make things right."

As I am about to write this review, I cannot help but congratulate myself as this is my first read in 2015! Yay. Enough of congratulating myself for being an underachiever, and more of the book review itself. 

I was a bit of apprehensive at first because of the synopsis of the book. It reminded me a lot of Jay Asher's Thirteen Reasons Why (hence, the title of the review) and it's not that I hated that book; it's just that I didn't love it. It touched topics that I wasn't comfortable reading about, and I guess that  what I learned from Falkoff's Playlist for the Dead is that suicide isn't that hard to read about when mixed with the right parts. It was hard for me then, but it isn't hard for me now.

Plot: The story starts off with Sam finding a dead Hayden on his bed, and a playlist Hayden made for him just before his death. "For Sam—listen and you'll understand.", it read, but as Sam listens to each track, he's still left clueless. As new knowledge surfaces, Sam tasked himself to find out why Hayden did what he did and as he solves the mystery, he gains friends and life lessons along the way. (That's pretty much it for the plot because saying too much will spoil the story)

Characters: The book, in terms of characters, have a little bit of everything—there's the round one, the best friend, the immature, the shy one, and the one that breaks the stereotype. There's nothing much to say about the characters but the fact that all of them are unique and have a different story. You will see a character not for what he truly is but what he's trying to convey and, surprisingly, you'll learn to love them or hate them at the end. One thing that you'll surely love is the way Sam grows and changes his view on things.

Ending: I'll describe it in four words. Right amount of closure.

RATING