At the time I requested this book I was very interested in it. Obviously, it has been a few years since I requested this and I am no longer interested in it now. It doesn't match my current reading tastes and I apologize that I didn't read it and thank you for the kindness you showed offering it to me.

I am a huge fan of Love Letters To The Dead. I loved Ava Dellaria’s In Search Of Us just as much. It is told in alternating viewpoints of Angie and her mother, Marilyn. Angie knows that her father died before she was born. She never knew him. After Angie finds a photograph of her mother and father she decides to go looking for answers. Dellaira built beautiful characters in James and Marilyn. Their love story had me rooting for them the whole time. What happened to James is a mystery that unravels slowly with great storytelling. We see Marilyn as a young girl, controlled by her mother who wants her to be a big star. Marilyn wants to go to college and escape her mother’s world and her drunk uncle who they have to live with out of necessity. We then see Marilyn as Angie’s hardworking mother. When Angie asks about her dad, her mother only cries. Clearly something horrible happened. When Angie cannot take not knowing any longer she goes on a road trip to Los Angeles in search of the family she has never met. The Joan Didion essays were also a nice touch and added a great depth to the characters. I highly recommend this book, especially for readers who enjoy changing point of view characters.

Oh, how I loved this read! I loved how the stories were parallel in telling the stories of both Marilyn and Angie how each of their life stories intertwined with one another. This is a beautifully written tale of a mother and daughter. the only downside for me was that I wished it was a little shorter, there were parts that I felt dragged out a little.

“The funny thing about beauty, James writes, is that in no way does its presence negate the truth of suffering, of injustice, of pain, but it does stand stalwart in its own right, as its own truth.” 

Ava Dellaira did it again for me and I might have to call her one of my favorites authors now because I thought there was no way she could make me this sad after I've read Love Letters to the Dead. I knew what to expect. I was coming in prepared, but somehow she still managed to break my heart. HOW? Just how?



Trigger warnings : violence, drug use, mentions of sexual assault. 

This book is gorgeous inside and out, it's amazing and the subject is incredible. I loved how it switches perspectives from Angie and her mother, Marilyn, their stories are obviously intertwined and you get to see them in their own journeys of self-discovery at 17-18 years old when they are both trying to know themselves better and understand what they truly need.

I have to say that I enjoyed Marilyn's story a little bit more and her personality as well. While I could understand Angie's reason for being selfish, I thought she mistreated Sam a great deal and their love story ended up being kind of meh to me. It wasn't realistic in the end and I felt like they might have been better off as friends. But that wasn't a big part of the book, so moving on.

Angie goes on a road trip with Sam to discover what happened with her father, how he ended up dead or if he's still alive considering her mother lied to her about her uncle being dead as well (while he's pretty much alive in Los Angeles). While we see Angie visiting Los Angeles for the first time and experiencing things that she never could before because Marilyn had always been rather protective of her, we also get to see Marilyn's part of the story. We see teenager!Marilyn moving to Los Angeles to pursue an acting/modelling career, which is more her mother's dream rather than hers, we see her struggling with being a good daughter and not disappointing her mother, but also fulfilling her dreams.

The most central part of the story is Angie's parents, James and Marilyn's love story. Something that was vibrant and really touching. I enjoyed reading about them slowly falling in love with one another and I thought their romance was very well developed. I loved their dates, the way they shared mix-tapes and their interactions with Justin, James' brother. They were so cute.

Also, I want to mention that James and Justin are black and Angie is mix-raced. I loved how Dellaira included racism, but in a very subtle way. It's not central, it's just something she brushes upon. I really liked it, now I'm not black, so I can't really talk about rep or anything like that. But to me, it didn't seem offensive or anything like that.

My only real complaint is that we didn't see enough of Angie and Marilyn together, I would have loved to see more flashbacks because they are the main characters and we get to see their stories, but they are a bit disconnected one from another.

I loved the writing, but that was kind of expected. I loved how passionate each character was, Dellaira creates very compelling characters that are very passionate about their hobbies. For example, in this one, Marilyn is very enthusiastic about photography and you can just feel her love for taking pictures, it's very relatable. Also, Angie has this kind of strange interest of searching up how many people are currently living in our world, but I could feel her "if there are so many people alive right now, how can you matter when you're such a little part of this world?" debate.

I would really recommend this book to you if you're looking for a contemporary that focuses on learning more about yourself, about your meaning in this world, on family and love and loss.

I received a copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Angie has never left New Mexico, but she knows that the answers to all the questions about where she came from are beyond the state lines and definitely something that her mother Marilyn does not want to talk about. Ever since she was a little girl, Angie would as her mother about her father, and each time Marilyn would shut down. Now that Angie is getting ready to start her senior year of high school and apply for colleges, she knows that has to find the answers she’s been seeking.

Marilyn has always found herself working to please her mother, Sylvie. Sylvie knows that Marilyn will be a star one day, but all that Marilyn wants to do is be a normal teen. Marilyn’s true passion isn’t being in front of the camera, but actuallly behind it. As she and her mom move back in with her alcoholic uncle, Marilyn is counting the days until she graduates high school and starts to live her own dreams. What she didn’t account for was the beautiful boy that lives in the apartment below, James.

Told from alternating chapters, readers go back and forth between 1999 and present day learning chapter by chapter the love story of Marilyn and James, and the journey that Angie is on to find answers. I think that often when books go back and forth between narrarators, I often have one that I like more and am disappointed when the book switches. That was not the case with In Search of Us. I found each character to be authentic, and her voice really shined through as I was reading. I love how Dellaira used music to help tell Marilyn’s story, and often found myself putting the song on my Spotify as I read the page. Readers will know that certain big events are on the horizon, but will not be disappointed by how things come to be. The only thing that I was a little disappointed about what how Dellaira handled Sylvie’s plot line. It almost seemed like an after thought. I really loved this book, it was just what I needed after having a little bit of a reading rut after giving birth to my twins. Highly recommended for all libraries!

What a gorgeous story! This was our second choice for our debut Scribbler box. We recommend everyone read this marvelous story.

I picked out In Search of Us because of its cover—I loved the variety of dots. I requested it and began reading it a few days later. As I read I became attached to the two narrators, a mother and daughter, Marilyn and Angie. Reading their story of love and loss was engaging and overall enjoyable for me.

Wow! I love that I was not expecting much from this, but was pleasantly surprised. I loved the way that the author wrote in two timelines. Definitely recommend this one!

I enjoyed the concept of this story and I actually really enjoyed the portions of the story told from Marilyn's perspective. Her story felt more developed and I actually found myself wanting more - especially with how rushed the ending felt. That said, I found it extremely difficult to connect with Angie's portion of the narrative. By the end, I never really knew her or connected with her. I think this is due large in part to the disjointed narrative that weaves back and forth between past and present. While I'm all for this technique, it didn't really work here because not only was it confusing but heavy details were placed on passages that didn't really need them, while other areas of the story could have been fleshed out better. Particularly as it relates to Sam and Angie's relationship as well as her reunion with Justin.

Overall - this wasn't a bad book but uneven pacing and an inability to fully connect with characters made it difficult to ever really feel absorbed in the story.

In LA in the late 1990s, Marilyn is a pretty 17-year-old with a mom who has ambitions; she expects Marilyn to make it big in Hollywood, so Marilyn can support them. But her mother never asks what Marilyn wants: going away to college and becoming a photographer. With Marilyn landing fewer jobs, they soon find themselves living with Marilyn’s unpredictable uncle.

Marilyn is just biding her time, living for graduation, when her “real” life will start. Then she meets James, the boy who lives downstairs. James shows her how to live in the now.

In the present, Angie has a single mom, a dead father she never met, and no one to help her sort out her identity. With her brown skin and curly hair, she looks nothing like her mom, and she knows nothing about her father. Then Angie finds out her mother has been lying to her all along, and she sets out on a road trip to LA with her best friend, Sam, hoping to discover who she really is.

In Search of Us is an emotional story about family, love, and finding yourself. These two stories are entwined seamlessly, and I’m not sure which I was more emotionally invested in, Marilyn’s or Angie’s. Both feel like their mothers don’t understand them, and both want more out of life. Marilyn is struggling to break her mother’s hold on her, and Angie struggles to find her father in more than just a single old picture. Racism is a strong theme here, portrayed honesty and realistically, with a large helping of grief. I was in tears by the end, and this book made my heart ache, as well as being so vivid I felt like I was a part of the story.

(Galley provided by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR) in exchange for an honest review.)

In Search of Us by Ava Dellaira is the beautifully heart-wrenching story of two teenagers, Marilyn and Angie. The stories span 2 generations. Marilyn is Angie's mother but we get to see her story growning up and we get to learn about Angie's father who died before she was born. We get to see how horrible Marilyn's mother and uncle were and we get to see how finding out about her fathers family really impacts Angie's life.

Angie is seventeen and she just found out that her mother has been keeping a secret from her. Her father died before she was born but she never knew he left behind a family. A family that should have been a part of Angie's life as she grew up. A family that she can't figure out why her mother never told her about. Angie goes off on a road trip with her ex boyfriend in order to search for her uncle. She also has this hope in he heart that if her mother lied about her fathers family then maybe, just maybe, she lied about her father being dead, too.

I loved Marilyn's story. I was just so drawn in to watching this beautiful relationship unfold between her and James. We know from the beginning of the book that James doesn't get a happy ending but the exact way his life was ended was horrible. This book quickly turned into something I was NOT expecting. James deserved so much better than what he got. He was an amazing character and Marilyn was lucky to have had him in her life. He completely her and she completely him. I will probably always wonder how their lives would be different today had he still been alive. Especially when Marilyn found out she was pregnant.

Angies story was okay. I liked her pursuit to find her uncle but the the relationship portion where she was driving all this way with her ex was kind of weird for me. But that was all cleared up at the end when we find out exact how Angie felt about relationships and how scared falling in love made her just because of what happened to her parents. It is okay to be confused it just sucks that she had to break someones heart in the process. She also broke her own heart but I think she will be okay.

In the end, this book broke my heart and tried to put it back together again. The author stayed true to her form and wrote a story that engulfs its readers from the beginning until far beyond the end. I still think about this book every day and how much some of us don't know about our parents pasts and how they go to where they are today.

Overall, I gave the book 4.5/5 stars.

I really enjoyed this book even though it broke my heart. I loved seeing our Mother-daughter duo from different time periods but at the same age. One falling in love for the first time and one searching for answers. I liked the back and forth narration of this book and loved our main characters. They just seemed so real and truthful. I'm gonna need a second to recover though because this book definitely tugged on my heart strings.

I received an ARC of this book via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

I loved Ava Dellaira's debut novel, Love Letters to the Dead. I've been eagerly awaiting her next book, and the concept of this one made it an immediate must-read for me. 

As amazing as it sounds, the actual book was even better than I had hoped. It's smart and sweet and I loved both timelines. I think a lot of times, one tends to be more interesting or I like one of the characters more, but I loved Angie and her quest to find her uncle (and, hopefully, her dad) and also Marilyn and her relationship with James. 

This is such a unique book, and also one of the best books I've read in ages. Ava Dellaira is definitely one of the best authors writing today and I can't imagine how much better her future books will be. 

Also if, like me, you're around Marilyn's age, her teenage chapters will seem very, very familiar. (The best kinds of nostalgic feelings!)

Highly recommended.

While I have never been to Albequeque for more than a few hours, passing through, on my way back East, I did grow up and spend a quarter of a century in Los Angeles, so the places that are discussed in this book, I am familiar with. Granted, I lived there in the 1960-1980s, and the action, in this book, takes place in the 1990s-2016’s or so, but some things do not change, while others do.

Back when I was a child, the freeways had names. You would get on the Hollywood Freeway, and then to the Harbor Freeway, or the old Pasandena freeway, or the Glendale one. Sometimes, with the Hollywood freeway, the numbers would change, but the freeway would be the same. I bring this up, because only the numbers are used in this book, and it seems weird to say that they took the 10 freeway, instead of the Santa Monica.

Beyond that, the story portrays Los Angeles as I recall it, for the most part. We all view our cities differently, even the same city.

The story of two women, a mother and a daughter, one white, the other black, and their struggles with love and identity. The scenes that take place in Albuquerque seem flat. I don’t feel the city there. But the scenes that take place in Los Angeles, I can picture.

The book is trying to explore the sense of identity, and what love is. But it feels as though the author wasn’t quite willing to go far enough. Although we know that Angie has trouble with being a black girl with a white mother, that is all we hear. We don’t feel the pain, Burt that people are surprised that she is her mother’s daughter.

I do like the conclusion. Angie is in search of her father, whom her mother says died before she was born. I was worried it would be sappy, and was glad when it was not.

What did have trouble with, with the going back and forth in time, was that sometimes the story would go back in time, and forward in time, then back, then back even more, before it settled on its time line. I felt as though I should have taken notes.

I give it three stars because the first half was so slow, it gains two stars. It isn’t up until the last half that it all starts to pick up steam, and make me interested, and thus it gains it third star.

Sort of a love story. Sort of a search self.

Thanks to Netgalley for making this book available for an honest review.

I wasn't ready for something so beautiful.

Told in two timelines, we follow Marilyn's romance with her neighbor, who is a black boy, while she struggles to follow her mother's dream and bear with her uncle's addiction to gambling. And we also follow her daughter's search for her father eighteen years later, having been lied to a whole life Angie comes across an article on her uncle, who was supposedly dead. Now she has a chance to travel all the way to LA, even if she has to beg her ex-boyfriend Sam for a hike.

There is a number of books that explore social themes very directly, this isn't one. And yet, the issues are so present it stings. I was very fond of how subtly Dellaira introduced it all. The relationship issues between Marilyn's mother and her grandmother, then between Marilyn herself and her mother, and finally between Marilyn and Angie, as each generation tries to be better than the preceding but fails in other parts for overcompensating. It's beautiful!

When I thought it would end there, the underlying problem of prejudice on Angie's paternal family side emerged. Unfortunately, that wasn't as beautiful. This book doesn't ask you to think about it, it shows the characters' reality and its consequences; it made me feels anxious at times; at others, very bitter.

Both main characters had their own way of thinking and reacting, everyone was very round and well developed. I'm not fond of drama YA's, I like have fun with them, swooning over my book boyfriends. And yet, this was so well written, it was a pleasure. Also, it had the right doses of drama, in no moment I felt the author overdid it. On the contrary, the story just kept going like life, with no time to digest.

It's a great book for a book club! And it'll also appeal to older crowds, not only for the quality of the narrative but also for the flashbacks. Having been a teenager in the 90's myself, I felt like going back in time whenever the narrator changed to Marilyn.

So why not give it five stars? It is kind of a personal system and it's inevitable to compare. This was good but it wasn't the best, if you get what I mean. Additionally, it just stood out for quality. When you think of the plot, girl searching for a father she's never met, there isn't much new there. But this just means it wasn't stellar, it's still a solid four-star read. I can't think of someone not to recommend this book.

I had wanted to read this book for many reasons. One, I really enjoyed Love Letters to the Dead. Two, I love multigenerational stories. Three, coming of age tales always work for me. Four, I never pass up a good romance. I am not quite sure what I was expecting from this book, but it delivered a total feelsplosion and was so beautifully tragic, I am kind of choked up right now just thinking about it.

•Pro: I wasn't sure at first, but I grew to love the alternating timeline. Contrasting Angie and her mom at the same age was quite interesting.

•Pro: The romance between Marilyn and James was so swoony and gooey. I just couldn't get enough of them. They had these aspirations and were working together to try and make their dreams come true, but they had to be make it happen together.

•Pro: James' family was really special. They experienced a lot of heartbreak, but they worked hard to fill those cracks with love. They were extraordinary people, who opened their home and hearts to Marilyn, and gave her the affection she was yearning for.

•Pro: Marilyn's grief ran so deep, and she carried it around with her for so many years. I ached for her, and was so happy that Angie went on this quest to find the girl in the picture.

•Pro: Sam was sort of broody, but he blew me away with his honesty and deep adoration for Angie. I totally understood his need for self-preservation, but also admired his willingness to support Angie after the way things went down.

•Con: I would have liked to have a gotten a little more resolution as it pertained to Angie. The ending was sweet, and I feel really good about where we left Marilyn, but I have quite a few questions about Angie.

•Pro: The story is peppered with a great songs and all these amazing book quotes. I found myself wistfully revising the 90s, while pondering all these thoughts Dellaira shared with me.

•Pro: Dellaira really made us wait to get the truth about Angie's dad. I kept concocting things in my mind. I had two theories, and it looked like my second one could be right, but then the truth was so much more devastating.

•Pro: I have so many emotions. My heart actually hurts for what was lost, but I am comforted by the way things eventually played out.

Overall: This was a an utterly exquisite experience for me. This book was fraught with emotion and meaning and so many wonderful characters to love. It tugged on my heartstrings, made me weep, but it also made me smile.

I LOVED this. It can be hard to keep readers interested when they know (at least part of) the ending before the story even begins, but I found myself irritated each and every time I had to put this book down. Even though I knew that, the more I read, the closer I was getting to the tragedy that so affected Marilyn and Angie's lives, I really wanted to find out what happened. It was beautifully told, with little moments - like the postal worker saying "I bet you'll both get in" to Marilyn and James when they mailed their applications - that were absolute heartbreakers.

“The funny thing about beauty, James writes, is that in no way does its presence negate the truth of suffering, of injustice, of pain, but it does stand stalwart in its own right, as its own truth.”

I received a free e-ARC through NetGalley from the publishers at Macmillan Children’s Publishing Group/Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. I fell in love with Dellaira’s writing from the first time I read Love Letters to the Dead, and I’ve read it several times since. I was so excited to get a copy of her new book!

Angie has never known her father. Raised by a single mother, Marilyn, who would do anything for her, she still feels as though an important part of herself is missing. Her dad was African American, her mother white, and there are things about growing up as a mixed-race child that Marilyn could never understand. Teenaged Marilyn dreamed only of getting out from under her mother’s oppressive illusion of making her a famous actress and going away to college. She wasn’t planning to meet James and fall in love, and she was never planning to raise their child without him. When Angie discovers that Marilyn may have been lying about her father’s death, she travels to L.A. with a friend in the hopes of finding him–and herself.

This book is really well done. The chapters alternate between Angie in the present, searching for her family in L.A., and Marilyn in the past when she met and fell in love with James. While the chapter lengths vary (a lot), it doesn’t seem to throw off the pacing, and I enjoyed the subtle crossover between the past and present–little things that Angie and James have in common, pieces of him that Marilyn passed along to her without her ever knowing. The novel really emphasizes how important personal history is. Angie’s big question is: if we don’t know our pasts and our parents’ pasts, can we ever really know ourselves?

Dellaira’s writing is as solid and beautiful as it was in Love Letters to the Dead, and I’m still in love with her style. I highlighted so many things as I was reading; it’s such a quotable book. I did have a small problem with the present tense. The entire novel, even Marilyn’s sections which are technically in the past, is written in present except for when the characters are reflecting on something, and the transitions are awkward. This is usually the kind of thing I stop noticing as I get further into a novel, but I didn’t. More than once, it jarred me right out of the story.

I really enjoyed Angie’s search for her history and the tension set up by being a mixed race child with a white mother, and those continual microagressions about how they can’t be related because they don’t look alike are especially poignant. Angie and Marilyn’s relationship is also really well done, and it’s nice to see a functional mother/daughter relationship that still has its problems (and works through them). Angie’s love interest is so bland though. There’s nothing wrong with Sam, but I was bored every minute of page time they spent together and had no interest in their little dramas.

I think this is why I found Marilyn’s sections so much more compelling than Angie’s. By comparison, Marilyn and James’s romance is the breath-stealing one in the book. Marilyn’s circumstances with her mother and her racist, alcoholic uncle are so much more dire, and James the far more interesting and well-developed character. While Marilyn gets Angie out of everything, it’s painful to know that their love story doesn’t work out. We don’t know quite why or how it doesn’t–whether James died in a car accident like she said, whether he’s still alive somewhere, or whether something else entirely happened–but we know that James isn’t there for Angie’s life. It’s an unexpectedly heavy novel, but it handles its issues with sensitivity and a deft hand. I would definitely re-read and recommend.

I review regularly at brightbeautifulthings.tumblr.com.

When it came to this title, I was neither blown over nor disappointed. I found the writing to be slightly long winded and a little on the annoying side. I have never been too into what I would call “girlie” fiction, but like to read one every once in a while to keep up with trends and help choose novels for the library. The stories of Angie and Marilyn were both interesting, and had similarities that link them together, yet there was nothing that really made this novel stand of from any other one in the same genre. Even though their stories were told together and had mirroring aspects, there is no connection between Angie and her mom so that we can see how this truly reflects in their relationship. For me, neither character was very relatable. I felt detached from the story as the girls seemed to ramble on about random thoughts and musings. There was too much focus on the every little though (weather outside, scenery, etc.) that sometimes the bigger picture would be lost. Although the story moved forward, there was never really a driving action that propelled the reader along with it. It was a chore to push myself along instead. I think that this book has some appeal for teen girls trying to understand their mothers, and the lives that they have struggled through, yet would not recommend this for an everyday read.

Solid story of a young woman trying to find out more about her past and being through the foggy lens of her mother's own history. Greatly enjoyed the honest look at how complicated mother/daughter relationships can be along with the book and music quotes peppered throughout the book as well. It would have been nice to explore the race issues more intensely.