Reconstructing Amelia - Kimberly McCreight - 4*

[Elise]

Kate Baron is a lawyer, living in New York, single mother of fifteen-year-old Amelia, who is a hard-working, mature private school teenager. At the beginning of the book, Kate gets a call from Amelia’s school informing her that Amelia has been caught cheating and is suspended–very out of character. By the time Kate makes her way through New York traffic to the school, it is to find out Amelia has jumped off the roof to her death. But Kate refuses to believe her daughter committed suicide, and when she gets an anonymous text confirming that thought, she starts investigating the last days/weeks/months of her daughter’s life.

The novel alternates chapters from Kate’s POV after the death and Amelia’s POV during the school year leading up to it, interspersed with text conversations, e-mails, Facebook posts, blogs, diary entries...

This was surprisingly good! I say surprisingly not because I was expecting it to be bad, but because I wasn’t expecting anything, really, this having been an impulse buy and being McCreight’s debut novel, so I didn’t have any preconceived opinion. At first I thought I would eventually be irritated by the texts and media used between the chapters, but it quickly became organic to the story, it wouldn’t have been the same without it, I think.

Often when books are described as page-turners I find out it’s a bit of an exaggeration, but in this case I really did have trouble putting it down sometimes. And it managed to keep me guessing a lot. I often end up guessing what’s going on ages before the conclusion, but here, I’d more often than not get only half my guesses confirmed. Like, I’d guess character X was doing something because of motivation Y, and I’d get the character right but the motivation wrong, or the motivation right but the character wrong. It was very well done, and now I’m definitely going to be looking for other books by her to see it I find the same elsewhere.

But I don’t know if I’m too old or too Canadian or what, but I do not remember sex being as important in my school life when I was fifteen XD