Center for Teaching & Learning

I loved Please Ignore Vera Dietz. It’s a powerful story that is both harsh and realistic; it’s also a mystery, and a bit of a ghost story. You will love every page of it.
Vera Dietz and Charlie Kahn have been best friends since they could walk. Both of them are trying to avoid their destinies: Vera’s mother got pregnant at seventeen and ran off with her podiatrist, and her father is a recovering alcoholic. Charlie’s mother is a doormat, and his father a bully. Now Charlie is dead. He turned on Vera five months before he died, but in her own way Vera had let him down his whole life. Vera is the only one who knows what happened on the night Charlie died. But she’s too afraid to talk—does she even want to talk? Does she want to clear Charlie’s name? This book is about friendship. It’s also about destiny and growing up and forgiveness.
I have never become so emotional over a book as I do every time I read this one— I’ve read it three times, so far, and each time I discover new details I missed last time and read into the theme even more. The characters are so well developed that I fall in love with Charlie but hate him at the same time. I can see where both Charlie and Vera are coming from and understand why they do the things they do. King rounds out the characters so well that I think of them as real people. Every character in Please Ignore Vera Dietz learns something and grows, a little or a lot. No one stays the same. A theme emerges from everybody’s growth. Vera learns to forgive, move on, and tell the truth. Vera’s father learns to stop ignoring everything that matters and to forgive himself. Charlie learns that you can avoid your destiny. I learned so much from each character.
This book is written in alternating narrative voices. We hear first-person from Vera, Charlie, Vera’s father Ken, and even the Pagoda, a building. Dietz also flashes us back to Charlie’s and Vera’s pasts. We learn what really happened that fateful night and about their relationship, bit by bit, through Vera’s, Ken’s, and Charlie’s memories.
This book is one of the saddest I’ve read. Although the ending is satisfying, I am always left crying at the way things turn out, at how life is. I can’t do anything to save Charlie, but I can understand why it happened.
You cannot live properly without Please Ignore Vera Dietz. So read it.
Eloise
Alfred A. Knopf, 323 pages