First, let me thank NetGalley and Red Hen Press for an advanced reader copy of this book.

I absolutely adored this book. The way the story is told through correspondences and documents hooked me instantly. The two main characters are both so pulsatingly human: witty and gritty, ambitious and fearful, talented and flawed. I breezed through the first half of the book, fully invested in finding out what happened to Edna as well as what *will* happen to Seth. Although I reached a point maybe 80% through the book where I did agree with other and thought "Okay, we've had enough long-winded letters, let's get to the resolution here," I don't think I would want any of them to be cut. I highlighted so much--long passages and glimmering little sentences a--because I felt both Seth and Edna were speaking directly to AND from my own soul as they tackled the big questions - "How do I live a meaningful life?" and "Will I ever create anything worthwhile?"

This book is a must-read for any creative person. It speaks to the ambition, longing, doubt, and resilience of the creative mind in such a beautiful way, IMO. As a fellow artist mother, I especially appreciated Edna's commentary on the fragmentation of self and how her story illustrates that being a writer (or painter, poet, whatever) is a long haul game. Un other reviewers, I appreciated the ending because I know that disappearance is just temporary and that the best is yet to come.

...

"Maybe that's my art form right now, an extended performance piece: surviving."

"You want to become anonymous? Easy. Become a mother."

"It's not a curse. It's a little bit inconvenient sometimes, but it's also a rare and precious gift. Now get your ass in your chair and write that book."

"I've accidentally started talking about why people write, not why people read. That answer is maybe even easier. The world is not enough. How can it be? Regular life--working for a paycheck, commuting without killing anyone, boiling the pasta, going to Target because you've convinced yourself a new plastic bin to organize your papers will solve something, everything. It's not enough. I want to live a million lives. I want to travel across the universe, and in and out of every brain. So I read books, which is as close as I can get."

*Please note that all quotes are taken from an advanced readers copy and aren’t final.
4 s jocelyn • coolgalreading535 345

I didn't know what to expect going into this book, but I was invested right away and loved the format of correspondence.

Even though it was told through different kinds of correspondence I felt we really got a sense of who Seth was in the way he interacted and corresponded.

I was invested all the way through in his quest to find Edna Sloane.

A delightful book and a love letter to literature, reading and finding out what really matters to you.

Thank you to the publisher for the eARC!2024 arcs4 s Lindsay HunterAuthor 20 books416

So much incredible stuff here. If you’re a writer, just starting out or wizened and questioning, read this book. 3 s Kelly Neenan3 2

As someone who was obsessed with the “ttyl” book series as a kid, I am always looking for epistolary novels that will take me back into the feeling of reading those books. (Also, do the “ttyl” books hold up? Has anyone revisited them?)

I think “Dear Edna” was so successful in creating this feeling in a really thought-provoking and existential dread-filled way. I will definitely be thinking about this book in the days to come.

Thank you to NetGalley and Red Hen Press for the ARC!2 s Christa Carter88 3

This was a slow burn! Written as a series of emails, text messages, and social media posts, we watch a young and hungry writer in NYC try to track down a famous author who vanished decades ago after releasing a best seller. Eventually, through these missives we learn more about both characters and their inner worlds, leading to deep and thought-provoking conversations on the purpose of creativity in a world that doesn't always spark inspiration. By the end, I cared about the characters and was happy to see the ways they changed and the things they discovered about themselves along the way.netgalley2 s Abby26 3

With thanks to Net Galley for the Advanced Reader Copy for review.
This one rates solidly at a 2.75 to 3 overall stars for me. A read you love on its surface, but struggle to behind the scenes.
At times I felt I was being forced to watch a manuscript reading by Amy Sherman Palladino after working a 12 hour shift with no remote sense left of why so many words were being used to convey a feeling or capture an essence - and an echoing thought of where is this going?
As the quote goes, this book truly gives “an infinity of traces without leaving an inventory”.
2 s Marlene3,102 223

There are plenty of variations on the saying that “Writing is easy. You just open a vein and bleed.” (I’ve always thought this was Hemingway, but a bit of Google-Fu turns up an earlier attribution to sports writer “Red” Smith in 1949.

But the story in this book has things a bit differently – at least from a certain literary point of view.

Writ-ING is actually easy, full stop. Lots of people do it every day in one form or another. We may not write letters much anymore, but we “tweet” tweets – or we did when it was called ‘Twitter’. Do people now ‘ex’ on X? (Just those types of digressions are common in the correspondence that makes up the bulk of this epistolary novel.)

Whatever tweets are called these days, we also write emails, memos and reports, caption Facebook and Instagram posts and text each other incessantly. It’s all writ-ING. Which doesn’t mean that any of it is either good or effective – just that it happens a lot more than we think it does.

But we’re not writ-ERS, and that difference is a big part of what this book is exploring.

Once upon a time in the 1980s, Edna Sloane was a young WRITER, a debut novelist, a literary wunderkind, whose first novel, An Infinity of Traces, took the book world by storm and became an instant classic.

Then she disappeared from the scene – at least the literary scene. The speculation was endless – even without social media as we know it today. Whether Edna Sloane was murdered, kidnapped, walked away on her own recognizance or got locked up in an institution of one kind or another, the woman was nowhere to be found.

Agatha Christie famously disappeared in 1926 but she was found in a spa hotel two weeks later. Edna Sloane wasn’t found at all until a junior editor at an online literary magazine tracked her down in 2017.

Dear Edna Sloane, the book, is the cumulated correspondence between the titular novelist, now nearing 60, and Seth Edwards, the young would-be writer who pretends he’s pursuing the elusive Sloane for an article to save his job. What he’s really doing is pouring out all of his own angst about just how difficult it is to be a WRITER no matter how desperately he tries to hold onto his dream.

And Edna answers. Not with platitudes, but with truth – the kind of truths that her own novel was so rightfully famous for. Seth’s quest for Edna brings Edna back into the world – even as it echoes the plot of her famous novel and pushes him out of it.

Escape Rating B-: There’s a life imitates art imitates life aspect to this story that draws the reader in more than one might expect – certainly more than this reader expected. At the same time, it is also very, ‘lit-ficcy’ in that there’s not a lot of action but there is a ton of angst.

That it doesn’t wallow in itself or its angst – in other words, that it goes about its business without getting carried away endlessly – makes it a relatively short bit of literary fiction, and the quest to find Edna Sloane carries the story along even though the events that take place around it fade into the background more than a bit – much as Seth does in the end.

What Seth’s side of the correspondence brings to the table – or screen – is his desperation to hang onto a dream that is slipping away. Seth is caught on the horns of the dilemma about the circus worker stuck with the job of cleaning up elephant poop who won’t leave because he’d have to give up show business.

Edna, on the other hand, brings back the heady, glorious days of the literary scene in the 1980s, even as she puts perspective on just how naive and innocent she was in her 20s – just as Seth is now. She also stands at the crossroads of her own dilemmas. Then, it was about balancing so-called ‘real life’ with her burning need to write – and being forced to choose and adopt a persona that would get her through the day and get the work of living done.

As well as discovering that she could either be feted for the work or do the work when it came to writing, but not both. Writing was easy, but being a writer in the sense of being part of the star-making machinery and finding a way to support herself as a writer was damn hard and in the end she set it aside even if that was not what she planned or desired.

And yes, there’s plenty about the emotional labor of women in that part of her life but it’s not the whole of the thing at all.

Still, Edna needs her writing to reconcile her past – and even more so the effect of her father’s past as a Survivor (of Auschwitz) – whether she’s feted or celebrated for it or not. So she’s never really stopped, even when it seemed she really, truly, seriously had stopped. She stopped being ‘a writer’ but that vein was still open so she never stopped writing after all.

Originally published at Reading Reality
1 Erin175 7

Seth Edwards, an aspiring writer and editor, becomes obsessed with uncovering the story of Edna Sloane, a once-celebrated author who vanished from the public eye. This obsession leads him on a path filled with unexpected discoveries about Sloane, the literary world, and himself.

It’s a thoughtful and nuanced look at literary ambition, the search for creative authenticity, and the rediscovery of a forgotten literary star. I love an epistolary novel, and choosing modern epistolary formats (email, text, social media posts and comments) was clever. The way in which Seth’s voice changes depending on the forum and the audience is incredibly true to life. He might not even be aware of it, but Edna, that brilliant observer of humanity, points out:

“For your generation I imagine it is fragmented even further – who are you, Seth Edwards? The Facefriend profile? The ImmediaPix feed? Right? Or am I off-base. Robin says I overestimate the fragmentation of the modern self. Maybe I do, maybe ‘twas ever thus, it occurs to me, as I remember my mother’s voice changing whether she was on the phone with customer service, the secretary at the synagogue, my father, with her sister in Texas, her other sister in Tel Aviv – how I judged her for shifting so slitheringly between all these selves – no one is a harsher critic than a daughter.”

Other things I loved: Edna is a great and subtle feminist. Her experiences as a woman in the world of publishing, and delicate rendering of the conflict between mother/wife and artist were so well done. Additionally, a book about a book (pr any great work of art) makes me desperately wish I could experience that work of art myself (think: The Goldfinch, The Fault In Our Stars). That's just a wonderful added piece of texture.

The novel's strength lies in its ability to explore profound themes such as the meaning of success, the pressures of creative life, and the impact of our cultural obsession with 'the next big thing' on literature and creativity. 'Dear Edna Sloane' is a must-read for anyone fascinated by the world of literature, the creative process, and the timeless quest for meaning in art. It's a love letter to literature and a reminder of the power of stories to connect us to what truly matters."

It's a book about why books matter:

"Fiction makes the unsorted mass of life feel meaningful, as if there were some organizing principle to our days."

Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC.
1 molly ?14 12

Summary:

Edna Sloane was a "wunderkind" author in the 1980s whose debut novel was quickly dubbed a modern classic. Shortly after her book was deemed a commercial success, Edna disappeared skipping out on her second book contract deal and, though her work is influential and well known, she was forgotten.

Fast forward to 2017. Meet Seth Edwards, a young aspiring author who is overworked and underpaid. His boss wants him to do a story on Edna Sloane for the company website, so he begins his quest of finding out what happened to Ms. Sloane.

Review:

The entire book is written in email, letter, and text correspondence along with other written content throughout the years. Though I enjoyed this book, the beginning had a slow start due to the business casual writing style Seth had to employ while trying to find information about Edna Sloane. At first his sense of humor came off as fake at the beginning, but as he builds relationships, his writing style relaxes a bit and the humor is more "real." These aspects made it difficult for me to get into at first.

Though very different, the novel has a similar concept to the Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo due to the nature of Seth trying to get an interview with Edna, who is very closed off and private. However, what really sets this book apart is Shearn's excellent writing. The voice of each character comes through with each correspondence. As a reader you are able to grasp Edna's quick wit and reflective nature as well as Seth's insecurities and admiration.

In addition, I really appreciated how the excerpts from Edna's books were extremely well written to the point they actually come off as a modern classic. Oftentimes authors will write excerpts from their characters' books, and they just aren't that good, almost as if the author is battling their voice and skill vs the character's.

Though I enjoyed the novel, I disagree with some plot choices, such as there being no answers surrounding what happened to one character at the end or how two of the characters never met up. However, I do chalk these choices as being very literary fiction decisions. I'm not mad at the choices--just a little disappointed as a reader left with questions.

I will close with a quote near the end of the book that resonated with me:

"And yet when I can trick myself into believing, for a moment, that a God might have created us, it seems very dear to me that this God would want us to create."

Thank you Net Galley & Red Hen Press for the advanced copy. All opinions are my own.1 Iona Carys79 4

2.5 stars rounded up ?? I haven't read a book with an epistolary format before - told exclusively through the format of letters, emails, social media etc - and I think a big part of why I didn't vibe with this book is because I don't think that this format is for me. I felt separated from the characters and plot and it was a little more clunky feeling to me. The way that Seth communicated grated on me a bit, because he seemed incapable of code switching - surely he would be capable of making some of his emails sound more professional?? The tone of all the communications started to blend together a bit for me- I don't feel that the characters were fleshed out enough for me to get to know them well enough.

There were some great themes explored (e.g., balancing creativity with societal expectations/pressures, the meaning of success, the experiences of being involved in the literary world), some humorous writing, and the premise of the book was unique and interesting, but it just fell a bit flat for me unfortunately. Thank you to Red Hen Press and NetGalley for the opportunity to read this e-ARC in exchange for an honest review.1 Natalie841 40

This is a very interesting epistemological novel, since it combines the traditional format with long rumination and internal dialogue within the format of correspondence. It is the story of eager, young Seth, an internet journalist who becomes obsessed with a wonderkind author, Edna Sloane, and her mysterious disappearance.

The book takes the reader on a full circle from searching for Edna to building a mutual relationship to searching for Seth.

I especially loved Edna’s story. It amazed me to read about her so-called disappearance, only to learn the truth. It really is a feminist moment about marriage and motherhood. I especially loved the inclusion of Edna’s father, an Auschwitz survivor.

This is an interesting read, though it veers from the traditional epistemological exchange.

Thank you Netgalley for this opportunity.1 Ruby301

What an enjoyable book! The story is told through correspondences, texts and documents. Shearn's characters are complex, and her writing shines on every page. To say much about the plot might give away its mysteries so I would recommend readers go into it blind. Highly recommended for artists and creative souls. Thank to NetGalley for the ARC. #DearEdnaSloane #NetGalleyfavorites-2024 netgalleyarcs1 Olivia177 8

Some interesting if half-baked ideas about writing, publishing, the internet, etc that were for me ultimately overshadowed by the author's extremely annoying tone, a tone which made me want to punch every single character in the head constantly.false-doc not-good1 Alexandria Faulkenbury71 2

A super fun read, especially if you write or pursue any other creative endeavors.1 Lolly K Dandeneau1,893 245

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