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.