Book 39/30.
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
4 ½ stars.
This was sooo good. So much so that I’m going to do something I rarely do which is give this an extra ½ star. I’ve mentioned a few times before that I’m not a believer in ½ stars when it comes to reviews, so this is one of those very rare occasions I give a book a rating that has a ½ star because Reconstructing Amelia was much better than a 4 star read, but not quite a 5 star read.
Reconstructing Amelia is a stunning debut novel in which Kate, a single mother, reconstructs her teenage daughter’s life, sifting through her emails, texts, and social media to piece together the shocking truth about the last days of her life. Each chapter is alternately narrated by Kate and Amelia, with an epistolary format in between constructed through texts, Facebook status updates and blog posts. I found this to be a brilliant formatting choice as the story unfolded for the reader more or less simultaneously as it did for Kate. Amelia’s story is narrated in first-person and Kate’s in third-person, an aspect I also found quite brilliant.
Reconstructing Amelia kept me engrossed and turning the pages. It had me eager to return to it when I was not reading it and I was just as eager as Kate to find out what happened to Amelia as the more I learnt about her daughter the more obvious it was that she did not die by suicide. The only reason this was not a 5 star read was because there were one or two occasions (cannot say which ones without giving anything away) where I felt the author dragged certain aspects of the plot longer than was necessary to prolong the mystery.
That said, this was a stunning debut novel and I highkey recommend it!!!
View all my reviews
** A guide to ratings **
1 star – did not like it
2 stars – it was okay
3 stars – liked it
4 stars – really liked it
5 stars – it was amazing
Lwile the Leo 