Review: Reconstructing Amelia by Kimberly McCreight

Title: Reconstructing Amelia
Author: Kimberly McCreight 
Publisher: HarperCollins
Release date: September 7th 2010
Reading level: Mature YA

Rating: 4/5

Buy on: Amazon | B&N | BookDepository

In Reconstructing Amelia, the stunning debut novel from Kimberly McCreight, 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.

Reconstructing Amelia is about secret first loves, old friendships, and an all-girls club steeped in tradition. But, most of all, it’s the story of how far a mother will go to vindicate the memory of a daughter whose life she couldn’t save.

Fans of Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl will find Reconstructing Amelia just as gripping and surprising. 

Reconstructing Amelia is a thriller/mystery where Kate tries to rebuild the last weeks of her daughter´s life, whom supposedly committed suicide, but a month after her death she receives a text message from a blocked number where she is informed that her daughter Amelia didn´t jump from the roof of her school, so with some help she can reopen the case and together with the police she begins to ask questions and investigate the text messages, emails and other social networks of Amelia, to find out what really happened, but Kate might not be ready for some of the things she finds out about her daughter.

Kate is a single and working mother, she´s a successful lawyer, from a major law firm and works long hours, and as a result she doesn´t spend much time with her daughter. Amelia is a 15-year-old girl that goes to a private school in Brooklyn, she´s a good student, with excellent grades and is well liked by her teachers. So when Kate receives a call from the school where she is informed that her daughter has been suspended and that she has to pick her up, but when Kate arrives to Amelia´s school, she finds several police cars, firetrucks and a ambulance in front of the school and shortly she´s informed that Amelia jumped to her death from the roof.

The plot is told from the point of view of Kate and Amelia, with a linear timeline in the present in the case of Kate and in the past, with several text messages, emails and facebook entries in the case of Amelia.


Overall, Reconstructing Amelia is a good mystery thriller, full of secrets, with a dark plot that explores the lives of teenagers, as well as elite school clubs, that kept me intrigued all the time and that in more of one occasion I was tempted to cheat and read the ending because I really needed to know what had happened to Amelia. In the end this is a novel that does not have a happy ending but it answers several questions about our main characters.