Elizabeth and Tara-Starr Preserve Their Friendship Through E-Mail in Snail Mail No More

How can friends stay connected despite vast distances that separate them? It’s easier now than it used to be. In P.S. Longer Letter Later, Paula Danziger and Ann M. Martin craft a correspondence between two 12-year-old girls. They write letters to each other, which is a slow process. It’s usually close to a week and sometimes even longer between sending off the letter and receiving the response. Having all that time in between sometimes puts a strain on the friendship, especially if the girls get testy with each other. In the sequel, Snail Mail No More, traditional pen and paper is all but out the window. They do send postcards and packages occasionally, but basically, when they want to write to each other, they use e-mail. The communication is so much quicker, allowing the friends to feel even closer this year than the last.

Elizabeth is a shy, quiet girl who enjoys poetry and lives with her mother and little sister in a small apartment. Though it’s a far cry from the elegant house where they used to live, Elizabeth is content with her change in circumstances. She’s happy to live so close to her friends Susie and Howie, with whom she has become especially close in the past few months, and she’s relieved that her erratic alcoholic dad is out of her life, maybe for good. Tara-Starr, whose move to Ohio prompted the correspondence in the first book, is adjusting to her new life too. She’s loud and flashy and isn’t afraid to express herself. This year, she has a lot on her mind, most notably her burgeoning interest in theater, an egg baby project that wreaks havoc on her romantic life and her mother’s pregnancy, with which she is very slowly coming to terms.

The letters in this book sound much the same as the ones in the first. The only real difference is the lack of a handwritten signature at the end of each one. The girls also have some fun with subject lines. But the length and frequency of the e-mails actually isn’t impacted all that much. It isn’t as though they write to each other five times a day now, nor are their e-mails generally vastly shorter than the letters. There might be a quick two-sentence e-mail sprinkled in here and there, but mostly, we’ve still got long missives that come in maybe once or twice a week. Elizabeth’s are more hesitant, Tara-Starr’s more open, but both of them are the products of kind, intelligent 13-year-olds.

Once again, I enjoyed the book and found its style easy to slip into. Neither of the narrative voices wowed me the first time, and they didn’t the second time either – though to be fair, I read both shortly after reading Gary Schmidt’s Okay For Now, which features one of the best young adolescent voices I’ve ever encountered in a novel. By contrast, Elizabeth and Tara-Starr feel pretty prosaic, but they also feel authentic and contemporary. (Well, almost-contemporary. This was ten years ago; perhaps a third installment would find the girls, now young adults, commenting on each other’s Facebook pages.) They haven’t outgrown their use of multiple exclamation points, question marks or “o”s in the word “so”. They definitely sound their age, and the way they struggle with the crises that come their way feels very realistic.

I enjoyed this book about as well as the first. Some interesting twists develop, and some of the side characters come into better focus. We get to know Susie and Howie pretty well, along with a couple of Tara-Starr’s friends. A couple of them even get e-mails addressed to them, during the portion of the book in which Elizabeth is visiting Tara-Starr. This segment is a little silly, since the girls are finally together but they keep writing e-mails to each other, but I chalk that up to excitement over the novelty of e-mail, with both have just begun using, and wanting to remember what they did during their time together. E-mails can serve as wonderful journals; just make sure to save your outgoing messages.

Snail Mail No More is an enjoyable epistolary novel that explores the continuation of a long-distance friendship, acknowledging the changes that must happen between best friends over time as each develops friends and interests apart from the other. In the midst of these changes, that friendship endures, and sometimes having a friend to pour out one's heart to in writing can be just as powerful as having a physical shoulder to cry on. In this book, Elizabeth and Tara-Starr provide each other both, leaving young readers with optimism about the capacity of friendship to endure in spite of – and maybe sometimes because of – challenging circumstances.

A Friendship Endures Despite Distance in P. S. Longer Letter Later

I’ve been very into epistolary stories lately, so I was excited to stumble upon P.S. Longer Letter Later, a mid-grade novel written by Paula Danzinger and Babysitters’ Club creator Ann M. Martin. This 230-page book consists entirely of letters shared between two seventh-grade friends, Elizabeth and Tara-Starr (who prefers to spell her name Tara*Starr). Martin writes as Elizabeth, the quiet poetry enthusiast who lives with her parents and little sister in a fancy house and is dealing with her best friend’s departure. Danzinger writes as Tara-Starr, an only child who is flashy and exuberant and adjusting to her new life in faraway Ohio with her youthful parents. Both girls seem to be reflections of the authors’ personalities, and the novel proceeded organically, one letter at a time, with neither one knowing just what would come next.

It’s an interesting collaboration that works pretty well. We get a very strong sense of who these girls are. Elizabeth is cautious and considerate; a crisis begins to brew in her family shortly after Tara-Starr leaves, but she doesn’t want to pry too much into what’s happening or make many judgments about the behavior of her parents. Tara-Starr is freer with her emotions. She starts off the school year furious with her parents, and she doesn’t hang back from saying so. Throughout the year, her feelings toward them go up and down, and she vents all of her frustration to Elizabeth – and wishes Elizabeth would be a little more vocal about her own frustrations.

This book reminds me a bit of the Friends 4-Ever series, which involved a group of friends who pledge to write to one another after one of their number moves away. There are only two correspondents in this case, though, except for the very occasional letter to or from Tara-Starr’s mother Barb. It takes place during the course of one school year, and there are no chapter separations, just one letter after another. Most letters are at least two pages in length; it’s a week or two between letters, so these girls have a lot to say to each other, especially since this is a pretty eventful year for both of them. They definitely sound like seventh-graders, especially Tara-Starr, who is prone to using multiple exclamation points and question marks and huge strings of “o”s in the word “so”. The letters are not especially eloquent or literary, but they do feel authentic. It’s easy to imagine this as a real series of letters between real pre-teens.

The book deals with several topics that many middle-schoolers must face. First and foremost, it’s about adjusting to a new life after a move. Tara-Starr has the biggest adjustment to make, since she’s starting off fresh, but it feels like a difficult new beginning for shy Elizabeth too, and without the excitement of being in a new place. Eventually, Elizabeth must also deal with several changes on the home front, including job loss and a mid-life crisis on the part of one of her parents. Meanwhile, Tara-Starr must adjust to her parents’ new, more mature outlook on life, as well as their desire to have a baby. Through it all is the difficulty of maintaining a deep friendship despite distance. Because of the expense, phone calls are a rarity, and miscommunication is all too easy when it’s impossible to smooth things over immediately. It seems inevitable that two girls in the midst of disquieting changes would eventually say the wrong thing to each other and introduce a rift into their relationship. But this book is optimistic about the ability of true friends to weather such misunderstandings, even from afar.

P. S. Longer Letter Later is a quick, down-to-earth read about two friends who refuse to let geographical proximity dictate the extent of their relationship. I’d readily recommend it to any friends facing a separation as encouragement that their friendship can continue and even deepen even though they no longer live in the same town.