(Goodreads)
Litigation lawyer and harried single mother Kate Baron is shocked when her daughter's exclusive Brooklyn private school calls to tell her that Amelia—her intelligent, high-achieving fifteen-year-old—has been caught cheating. But when Kate arrives at Grace Hall, she's blindsided by far more devastating news: Amelia is dead. Despondent, she's jumped form the school's roof. At leas that's what Grace Hall and the police tell Kate. It's what she believes, too, until she gets the anonymous text: Amelia didn't jump. Now, Kate is going to find the truth—no matter where it leads. Sifting through Amelia's e-mails, text messages, and Facebook posts, Kate reconstructs the pieces of her daughter's life and the people in it, uncovering why she was on Grace Hall's roof that day—and how she died.I raced through the last 100 pages or so. So fast that sometimes I had to tell myself to calm down and reread sections that I skimmed through because I wanted to know everything at once!
Reconstructing Amelia has a very pleasing format in that it alternates chapters between Amelia and her mother, Kate. Nothing new, right? A lot of books do this flip flop format, much like Beside Myself by Ann Morgan. However, in between those flip flop chapters (is there an appropriate term for this? alternating chapters?) are a variety of texts, Facebook updates, and blog posts. I honestly really enjoyed that aspect of this novel. It was like being handed pieces of evidence and clues. The only thing that could have possibly made it better was to see a more mobile-like format on those pages.
We meet Amelia at the start of the school year, about two months before her death (all the chapters are time stamped). She's honestly just another teenager: smart, confused, with unique quirks to her (she LOVED Virginia Woolf). When the novel began, I sometimes wanted to skip through Kate's sections because I wanted to know so badly what happened to Amelia, what led to her death. However, as the novel went on it became the opposite, where I wanted to skip through Amelia's sections and catch up with what information Kate had found.
This novel definitely becomes a page-turner and I was not disappointed with the ending. My only complaint is that there were conversations I looked forward to that never happened. Or if they did, they happened 'off-screen', perhaps to cut down on the novel length (380 pages, my weak wrist will remind you). Reconstructing Amelia never felt slow, because there was always information to find, clues to seek out, moments to dissect.
Memorable Quote
"But the tour did remind me that my life had been bigger than just that one moment. One girl. One set of words on paper. That I had gone through other things before - good and terrible, funny and awful - and I had survived." (368)
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