Reconstructing Amelia by Kimberly McCreight

Amelia is ,as a matter of fact and unfortunately, not going to be reconstructed, not now, not ever ,no matter how much her mother Kate wants , because Amelia is dead and gone.

Whether this teenage girl killed herself or was murdered is what the author Kimberly McCreight unravels in this, her debut novel. It is indeed an incredible way to begin a career as a writer because the book is a page-turner to say the least, it kept me hooked and was really hard to put down. It is one of those novels in which the more you read the more you know and therefore the more you want to go on reading.

I disliked most of the characters,though, they had all made several and sometimes unforgivable mistakes and had many secrets to keep . Amelia , an unsupervised and neglected private school girl whose poor choices , mainly due to bad judgement and no parental support whatsoever , cost her what could have been a successful life. Kate, a never-stay-home mum with a promising career at a law firm , certainly regrets and pays for the decisions that she made. Kimberly McCreight shows how clueless most parents are about their adolescent children, some because they don't have time, some because they wouldn't know what to do if they knew, so therefore they don't want to know and some because they don't really care, they have too much going on in their own selfish existence.To make matters worse, both mother and daughter are surrounded by a series of frenemies and back-stabbing colleagues who make their lives even harder.

The school doctor makes this comment about clubs and I think it applies to many groups and cliques which abound in our society among people of all ages and backgrounds.

"This is largely the point of the club, to make outsiders feel badly and to constantly threaten insiders with losing their special status. These dynamics are always fraught with danger."

The plot may resemble in many ways the atmosphere of the TV show Gossip Girl, but much better, much more real and without a shadow of a doubt much more interesting and engaging.It also has some very sad and heart-breaking parts since the writer describes skilfully the intense suffering for the loss of a child.I found it so vivid that I almost stopped reading but I am glad I didn't.

When I read the last chapters I was slightly disappointed by the way it had ended, I guess I was expecting something different ( I know this is vague but I don't want to reveal anything) , however, then I thought twice about it and I realised that the way it ended made the book more real and plausible. I would certainly recommend this stunning first novel to anyone, really anyone ,who likes reading.