Reconstructing Amelia
A Gripping and Shocking Mystery About a Mother Discovering Her Daughter's Secrets
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- ¥850
Publisher Description
Ever wondered what goes on inside your daughter's head?
Stressed single mother and law partner Kate is in the meeting of her career when she is interrupted by a telephone call to say that her teenaged daughter Amelia has been suspended from her exclusive Brooklyn prep school for cheating on an exam. Torn between her head and her heart, she eventually arrives at St Grace's over an hour late, to be greeted by sirens wailing and ambulance lights blazing. Her daughter has jumped off the roof of the school, apparently in shame of being caught.
A grieving Kate can't accept that her daughter would kill herself: it was just the two of them and Amelia would never leave her alone like this. And so begins an investigation which takes her deep into Amelia's private world, into her journals, her email account and into the mind of a troubled young girl.
Then Kate receives an anonymous text saying simply: AMELIA DIDN'T JUMP. Is someone playing with her, or has she been right all along?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
After her teenage daughter Amelia's mysterious suicide, litigation attorney Kate Baron becomes an unlikely amateur sleuth in McCreight's diverting, if busy, debut. Kate's grief over Amelia's death and guilt about her failures as a mother are compounded by a series of anonymous text messages intimating that Amelia was actually murdered. She partners up with NYPD Lt. Lewis Thompson, who involves her, to an implausible degree, as an equal in the investigation as they trawl through Amelia's online history and interview her classmates and their families. The real story of Amelia's life and death emerges slowly, through a creative blend of Kate's present, Amelia's past, and such varied communication methods as texts, e-mails, blog entries, and Facebook status updates, leading to a chaotic landslide of climactic revelations that strains believability. Amelia's first-person narration provides the most human note, as McCreight portrays the darkness of adolescence, complete with doomed love, bullies, poisonous friendship, and insecurity. Fans of literary thrillers will enjoy the novel's dark mood and clever form, even if the mystery doesn't entirely hold together.
