Reconstructing Amelia,

A Book Review

Title : Reconstructing Amelia

Author: Kimberly McCreight

Year Published: 2013

Synopsis

In Reconstructing Amelia, lawyer Kate Baron got a phone call from her teenage daughter’s exclusive school. The school informed her that her daughter, Amelia had been suspended, for plagiarism.

A deed she thinks her academically inclined daughter would most unlikely commit. But when she arrives at her daughter’s school, she was too late- for all she arrived to was the lifeless body of her daughter. Initially, it was declared as suicide. Until she gets an anonymous text saying her daughter didn’t jump. Kate wants to vindicate the memory of her daughter. She is now reconstructing her daughter’s life through the texts, messages, emails, facebook posts, and letters that she left behind.

Thoughts From The Soapbox Filipino on Reconstructing Amelia

Over and above the story itself, the the novel was a page turner for me because of its narration.

Three P.O.V.’s, that of of the daughter Amelia Baron, the mother, Kate, and gRaCeFULLY, a blog spreading malicious rumours, narrated the events.

As the title suggests, Reconstructing Amelia is a reverse engineering of sorts as a mom gets to (really) know her daughter, only after when she had already passed away. It is those realizations of the mother about her daughter that will break the readers hearts.

The book will break your heart especially if your a mom. With that great amount of generation gap existing between us parents and our children, nowadays—we are not anymore privvy to their thoughts and actions—-and even their dreams and ambitions. So you will feel the mom’s pain as she was sifting through informations which seemingly revealed the kind of daughter she had or thought she had. Then later on , you will also rejoice with the mom when she finds out that some of the things written about her daughter were not true, and that she raised a fine young woman after all.

I am currently loving it and I am giving this book 4 hearts ♥️ ♥️♥️♥️ all because I did not expect it to end the way it that way.

One thing I have learned about stories that strongly build denounement is that they usually have a weak ending—most of the time. I guess I wanted something more from the ending. Well, I must have hoped someone gets punished for what the daughter went through. Therefore, it was not quite the ending I hoped for. Someone deserved punishment for the misfortunes both the daughter and mother went through, I am vindictive like so.

I recommend this book to moms like myself only if the themes like gay relationships, intense bullying and noxious friendships do not strongly affect them. But there are so many insights here that parents like myself can learn from.

So that would be the most I will reveal about the book!

I end here, for fear that I might be giving up the entire story. Till the next!