SOME SPOILERS BELOW!!
Reconstructing Amelia caught my attention because the reviews on the front of the book claimed it to be as good as Gone Girl and deserving of as much praise. Unfortunately, the review was way off.
Amelia Baron is a quiet, well behaved, studious 15 year old girl who is accused of plagurising an English paper and proceeds to throw herself off the school roof. The death is ruled a suicide but months later her Mum, lawyer Kate, receives a text with a single line. "Amelia didn't jump".
What follows is basically Gossip Girl crossed with a dodgy channel five murder/cop show.
Amelia turns out to have had quite the life in her final months, involvement in secret clubs, on the receiving end of homophobic bullying, posing for risque photos and spending hours talking to a young boy she never even met. Amelia's mother unravels slowly whilst trying to discover what really happened to her daughter and exposes some serious flaws within the story.
Firstly the case is reopened and investigated by a single officer, just one. Mum Kate never meets any other officer once the case is reopened, its seriously implausible and i spent half the time wondering if he was even an actual officer. He also allows Kate to tail him in interviews, permitting her to ask questions, sift through evidence herself without any supervision, basically doing the work he should be doing with a team. Completely beyond the realms of a normal investigation.
The girls in Amelia's school are just a little too bitchy, even by Gossip Girl standards, the extent of their vicious bullying would be a crime and the school, we are expected to believe, remained in denial about the entire situation for their own protection.
A teacher is exposed as having written a Gossip Girl-esque blog exposing student secrets and nothing appears to happen to her, everyone and anyone knows how to disguise their numbers, emails and i.p addresses. It's like CSI for bitchy rich school kids.
When the killer/not killer is exposed the mother just accepts their story about it being an accident and moves on, without any other questions.
It had potential to be brilliant but it just didn't get there, the story and characters were too exaggerated, Amelia was stretched so far out of her original personality her actions made no sense, her mother was irritating, the police officer unprofessional and the blog, Facebook and text excerpts could have been siphoned straight from Gossip Girl or Pretty Little Liars. It is a teen fiction novel, with elements of the previously mentioned books masquerading as adult crime fiction, it definitely is not on parr with Gillian Flynns Gone Girl.
Two stars. I didn't love this one!
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