Pen Pal

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of sexual violence and harassment, mental illness, child abuse, pregnancy loss, graphic violence, sexual content, death, physical abuse, and emotional abuse.

As a dark romance, Pen Pal is ultimately about the love story between Aidan and Kayla. Many romances frame their love stories as transcendent or supernatural, but Pen Pal takes this trend a step further by portraying the main characters as ghosts trying to find each other after death. In Dante’s poem, he augments Alighieri’s “[l]ove that moves the sun and the other stars” to mean his love for Kayla (65), and the novel’s events support this claim. From the beginning, Kayla and Aidan feel a pull toward one another that defies their expectations, and they consistently find auspicious similarities in how they think and feel for each other. Though the novel concludes with the assertion that Kayla and Aidan’s ghosts need revenge, their ultimate moment of relief centers on the reunion, finding each other after Michael murdered them. Kayla and Aidan’s love story is about the potential for destiny or fate to arrange a romance that exists beyond physical, corporeal relationships, extending into and beyond the afterlife.