Annie LeBlanc Is Not Dead Yet by Molly Morris: Review by Colleen Mondor
Annie LeBlanc Is Not Dead Yet, Molly Morris (Wednesday 978-1-250-29006-9, $20.00, 336pp, hc) June 2024.
The town of Lennon, California has a secret that only the residents (and a few chosen former residents) can know. The Welcome Back contest allows the townspeople to nominate someone to come back from the dead for 30 days. This year, Wilson Moss has won, and that means her friend Annie is returning, but there are two problems. The first problem is that one year before she died in a drowning accident, Annie and Wilson stopped speaking to each other. The second is that Ryan, the third member of their formerly tight trio, got into a very ugly fight with Annie at the same time and she is furious that Wilson is bringing her back. The biggest problem, though, is that Wilson is looking for a contest loophole to keep Annie alive, but the only one she can find means making all of them friends again. Welcome to the most important 30 days of all of their lives and one of the better coming-of-age novels you are going to find, Molly Morris’s Annie LeBlanc Is Not Dead Yet.
First and foremost, this is not a mystery novel. (It is also not a zombie novel!) Annie drowned in her swimming pool after her eighteenth birthday party. While Wilson has wondered in the months since why Annie was alone (she and Ryan were, of course, not invited), the only secret is about how things didn’t work out for that night the way Annie hoped they would. But rest assured her death was an accident (which is explained later), and Wilson and Ryan are not trying to solve a crime. What Annie LeBlanc Is Not Dead Yet is all about is why the three former friends broke up in such a devastating way. This is the story of things unsaid, things allowed to fester, and the many many ways in which friends can be spectacularly wrong about each other. There’s some romance, some trying to see your parents in a different light, and many visits to a bakery for pie and chocolate that will make your mouth water. I also must mention there are a lot of references to Buffy the Vampire Slayer (comic book, not TV series), which Wilson adores, and eighties music which her mother loves. (Wilson is named for Wilson Phillips. I’m not going to explain that reference, but insist that you listen to ‘‘Hold On’’ when you find them on YouTube. Welcome to my teenage years.)
Morris does a great job of showing how even in the most exceptional of circumstances – your friend has come back from the dead! – old hurts can still make everything impossible. There is just so much stuff Wilson, Ryan, and Annie have to talk through and so little time to do it. And remember Annie’s parents (who did not have any say in her return) also want some time with their daughter, and Annie, who remembers nothing of where she has been but is fully aware that she is dead, would like to enjoy some things she has missed and not, you know, get into the issues that found her alone in a pool on the last night of her life.
So how to cram all the necessary quality time together to accomplish the friendship repair necessary to Wilson’s long-shot goal of keeping Annie alive? Well, it’s not easy, and things are made worse because none of the girls really want to be honest about what went wrong. The angst is real and painful and Morris doesn’t give anyone an easy way out. They are going to have to do the hard work to understand each other if they want to be friends again and sometimes, well, even when the stakes are sky-high, the hard work can just seem too hard.
Annie LeBlanc Is Not Dead Yet is a very smart, very true, very sincere novel about why friends matter. Morris’s smart use of the Lennon Historical Society and the Welcome Back contest is excellent and I was happy that she didn’t complicate things with a whole lot of backstory; she gives readers enough to know what is happening and then throws the three girls together to work out their differences. (And they have A LOT of differences to work out!) The plot zips along, the many relationships (friend, romantic, family) are all interesting, and Lennon itself sounds like quite a place to visit. Upon turning the last page I realized this book is one to read and pass along to your friends. Morris makes things just twisty enough to turn the pages, but most of the show is Wilson, Ryan, and Annie, and they are stellar. Molly Morris is definitely a YA author to watch.
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This review and more like it in the September 2024 issue of Locus.
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