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Book Club & Reading Group Guide
Bring your discussions to life with the official Dear Alderone Book Club and Reading Group Guide! Packed with thought-provoking questions, journaling prompts, and playlists, this guide deepens your connection to the story and its themes. Perfect for sparking meaningful conversations in your group.
Praise
"Charming, funny, heartfelt and multilayered, Dear Alderone is a poignant coming-of-age tale within a coming-of-age tale. Ami Hendrickson's engaging book will have you cheering for feisty teenagers, multi-generational family connections, and the resiliency of the human heart."
—Ava Chin, author of the award-winning Mott Street: A Chinese American Family's Story of Exclusion and Homecoming
The characters in Dear Alderone – created and brought to life by Ami Hendrickson – feel real to me. Perhaps it's because I can relate to the grief and the looking for resilience in the face of it. Or perhaps it's the connection with piano improvisation as a way to regroup and recharge.
It's these and many, many more that connect me with this story. And when these characters reach those moments of connection and self-discovery, I cheer for them because I've found a part of me in their story.
—Stan Stewart, composer/improviser of the album "Characters" inspired by Dear Alderone
Combining a modern family drama with a 1980s coming-of-age tale, in Dear Alderone Hendrickson provides the answer to every writer's question: "What will my kids and grandkids think if they ever find my journals??"
—Ann Imig, MSW, Certified Coach, Founder of LISTEN TO YOUR MOTHER
In Dear Alderone, a long-hidden journal is the unexpected key that allows Rayna to imagine her grandmother not just as her guardian, but as a person like herself with crushes, insecurities, and fears. This novel offers a sensitive portrayal of two teenage girls generations apart as they each cope with teen crises and family tragedies. Dear Alderone is an insightful and often witty novel you won't want to miss.
—Trudy J. Morgan-Cole, Canada Book Award-winning author of The Cupids Trilogy and Most Anything You Please
Ami Hendrickson's Dear Alderone is a sensory fever-dream: layer upon layer of longing, discovery, grief, and hope bound together in ribbons of haunting, lyrical prose.
It's a compulsively readable and quietly profound plunge into the very nature of human connection--what we know, what we share, and what we hold closest to our hearts in the quiet of self-reflection. It's a gently delivered reminder that our stories are worth telling; that we are worth knowing. That there is much more to each of us than meets the eye.
There is a melancholic echo of missed connection in Hendrickson's masterful telling that leaves the reader with an urgency to forge new and stronger bonds with the ones we love while we still have the chance. But there is also joy. And the promise of more meaningful tomorrows. It is, simply, a beautiful, heart-shifting book.
—Marie Kuipers, author of We're All Mad Here: an (in)elegant memoir
About Ami Hendrickson
Ami Hendrickson’s books include Dear Alderone, a novel; Wilson the Dalmatian, for emerging readers; and Borderlands, a chapbook of poetry and flash. A book coach, she enjoys conducting writing workshops and helping authors complete their manuscripts.
She is the ghostwriter and editor of several books for internationally renowned equine professionals and of projects for the United States Hunter Jumper Association and the United States Polo Association.
Ami lives in southwest Michigan and holds degrees in English and Education, though had she been aware that “panda cuddler” was an actual paying job, she suspects her career path would have been quite different.