Title: Reconstructing Amelia Author: Kimblery McCreight
Published: April 2, 2013
Genre(s): Mystery/Thriller
Page Count: 405
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:Kate's in the middle of the biggest meeting of her career when she gets the telephone call from Grace Hall, her daughter’s exclusive private school in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Amelia has been suspended, effective immediately, and Kate must come get her daughter—now. But Kate’s stress over leaving work quickly turns to panic when she arrives at the school and finds it surrounded by police officers, fire trucks, and an ambulance. By then it’s already too late for Amelia. And for Kate.
An academic overachiever despondent over getting caught cheating has jumped to her death. At least that’s the story Grace Hall tells Kate. And clouded as she is by her guilt and grief, it is the one she forces herself to believe. Until she gets an anonymous text: She didn’t jump.
An up-and-coming litigation lawyer is in a meeting when her daughter’s school calls: her daughter’s been suspended, and needs to be picked up right away. But by the time she arrives at the school, her daughter, Amelia, has fallen from the roof and is dead.
This is how Reconstructing Amelia begins, and it serves as an intriguing entrance into Kimberly McCreight’s debut. The rest of the novel deals with the lawyer, Kate’s, investigation into her daughter’s death, as she believes without a doubt that Amelia would never have committed suicide, which is what the police investigators quickly decide upon. What at first seems like a grieving mother’s denial becomes justified as more and more information is revealed, and the book journeys into the world of upper-class teens and their cliques and romances, as well as adult grievances that bleed over into their children’s lives. At the center of it all, of course, is Amelia’s online existence: her Facebook, her texts, emails, blogs, etc. It’s a complex story that, by the end, dives into near-melodrama, but its bones are good, and if the beginning was slow, the last fourth was completely engrossing. McCreight shows promise here, though the book itself strained my good graces at times.
What Reconstructing Amelia primarily attempts—at mostly succeeds at—is to look into online existence, and how that changes how daily lives are lived. Amelia, via texting and email and such, is able to live a life completely under wraps, private from her mother, her best friend, and anyone else she wishes to exclude. This is something that’s very difficult to grasp for Kate, her mother, and I imagine for a lot of older readers (AKA not my generation or younger), this aspect of the novel will be intriguing and revelatory. I know from personal experience that children are able to get away with a lot of things online that they shouldn’t, especially if their parents are more hands-off. I realize this book is a couple of years old, of course, and so while for me most of this “shocking” information about online bullying and whatnot was old news (because my generation is the one being most directly affected), it’s good that McCreight has been able to incorporate these aspects into a suspense novel. For Kate, discovering what happened to her daughter isn’t a matter of unearthing physical clues or going door-to-door: it’s looking through Amelia’s text messages and internet history, tracing IP addresses and trying to put email exchanges into context. This is a new, “modern” take on writing a mystery, and I like what the author has done here, both because it’s something fresh, and because I find that’s it’s incredibly relevant in today’s world, where a great deal of bullying and harassment happens behind the protection of a computer screen.
Primary concept aside, I am of two minds about the actual plot. As I mentioned earlier, Reconstructing Amelia starts off slow, and for a long while I felt that the story was going nowhere. Kate was adamant Amelia didn’t kill herself and she received some cryptic text messages, but that was all. The story felt stagnant. Around the midway point, I felt that I knew a great deal about the characters, but nothing about the whys and wherefores of Amelia’s death (mild spoiler, I guess: it wasn’t suicide). Yet after the halfway point, after the police re-opened Amelia’s case, things came into focus rapidly. The truths Kate began to uncover came fast and all at once, and the actions behind her daughter’s death became more and more complex with each new discovery. It was a fascinating, gripping ride to the epilogue, and I couldn’t have possibly put the book down before I finished. That quality of “unputdownableness”, I think, is the hallmark of a great mystery/thriller, and Reconstructing Amelia has it, if the reader is willing to wait for the plot to pick up.
And yet, in spite of how utterly engrossed I was in the story, by the end, I found that things were beginning to push believability. The reasons behind Amelia’s bullying became too vague, and the insertion of adult issues into the teens’ lives felt too wildly dramatic. The scene where the exact how and why of Amelia’s death came to light felt farfetched and silly. It seemed to me that McCreight stretched herself too thin and put too many balls up in the air in trying to make the most complicated and astonishing finale she could. I found that even as I was reading, I was pulled out of the story by the drama and spectacle of the final chapters, and that made it hard to buy into.
But the unbelievability of the climax was not my main issue here. For me, Reconstructing Amelia’s main flaw is the author’s writing, which is very poor. The beginning is too bogged down by pages-long passages where McCreight dumps the characters’ personal histories on the reader, which distracts from the action at hand. The author also falls into the trap of entirely vague descriptors. At one point, she mentions a character’s “exotic bone structure”—but what does that mean? It tells me nothing about that character whatsoever. Instead of giving good detail, the author just puts a blanket “he was a handsome man” or “she was drawn by her exotic looks” into the text, which actually serves no purpose. It’s not good writing.
Additionally, while the passages from Kate’s perspective are told in third person and are more or less decent, Reconstructing Amelia also alternates with Amelia’s perspective, which is written in first person, and really did not come across like a believable 15-year-old voice. In one paragraph we have Amelia describing a boy’s “deconstructed fauxhawk” (what does that even look like?) but in the next the characters are speaking in chatspeak: “Hey, BFF! […] BTW, you’re going to have to spill the four-one-one eventually” (actual quote).
Yet it seems that all of the issues I found with Reconstructing Amelia, while certainly distracting and annoying, could be fixed and resolved as the author develops her craft. Her teen characters are unbelievable and her plot wanders into the land of melodrama, yes. But this doesn’t change the fact that I found this book to be compelling and exciting. There are a lot of predictable and dull suspense novels out there, but this is not one of them. And because of that, I can forgive much. I believe it’s probably much harder to fix a boring storyline than it is to spruce up one’s tendency to info-dump.
So, not only does this book show promise for Kimberly McCreight’s future career, it’s also a good read because of that aspect that makes it promising: Reconstructing Amelia is riveting. That goes a long way, and I don’t want to knock that.
