Dandelion is Dead by Rosie Storey
368 pages | Published by Berkley
⭐⭐⭐⭐
The Set Up: When Poppy needs a new phone, she grabs her late sister Dandelion’s phone to swap. When she opens her sister’s dating app, she finds herself returning someone’s message, and decides that she’ll go out with him on what would have been Dandelion’s fortieth birthday. Poppy only intended to meet up with Jake once, knowing that pretending to be her dead sister is crazy, but the connection they have is real and palpable. Both Poppy and Jake end up spinning a very tangled web of lies, and over the course of the year they have to find their way back out of it.
I struggled with this book at first - Poppy’s lies in the beginning made me almost DNF this one at about 20%. But to go from an almost DNF to four stars is pretty amazing; I’m glad I kept going and gave myself a little more time to see the characters develop.
These are flawed and messy characters, absolutely. Jake and Poppy make some crazy decisions that I can’t personally imagine making, but even though they were messy and I didn’t like them at times, they felt real and grounded. As they learn more about each other and the grief that they’re carrying, they both grow an extraordinary amount throughout the story.
This book is so much about grief so there is definitely a sad color to it, but there’s so much hope here as well. Things are sad and bleak for most of the story, but it absolutely ends on an up-swing.
“…love didn’t end with life”
I’m excited to see where the author goes from here, because Dandelion is Dead fell into a unique genre placement for me; It’s definitely more like contemporary lit, and while there is a romance central to the story, I don’t know if I would shelve this in the romance section of a store. The writing was interesting as well. Some scenes were crystal clear, with laser sharp focus (like a certain poolside scene in France); but then other scenes felt almost like a fever dream, with thoughts swirling all over the place.
My final thoughts: A book with characters that are a bit hard to like, but who grow tremendously over the course of the story.
