Reconstructing Amelia

I’ll keep it brief.

This wasn’t for me.

Mind you, I cranked through this book and, thanks to a road trip to visit family, had a few hours in the car to burn through a couple hundred pages. But, in the end, it left me feeling meh.

It didn’t start out that way.

Reconstructing Amelia gets underway with a jolt. In the early pages, a New York City single mom has her world rocked to its core when her daughter jumps to her death from the roof of her posh private school. The question is simply, “why did she jump?” It quickly turns to “Did she really jump – or was she pushed?”

After the shock of that event, the book winds its way backwards. We read about life as a teenager from Amelia’s perspective and look for clues hidden in cryptic Facebook posts. We see mom’s side of things as she reaches back not only to the days before her daughter’s accident, but her life before she became Amelia’s mom. All of it is supposed to lead us to what happened on that roof and the truth about Amelia. Because I knew I was leading to that inevitiable reveal, I was turning pages quickly to get there. Then, I was turning pages quickly to just get done with the thing.

It wasn’t bad. It was just not great. I feel like the characters and even the plot relied too much on cliché (adolescent parties and secret clubs, single mom who works too much, etc.) When the author did reveal a few plot twists at the end, they just felt forced. I should have written down what I liked so much about the book before I finished it. I know it was a good start and kept me interested, but if it was a movie, I would have turned it off and read a book instead.