Book Review: Reconstructing Amelia

Title: Reconstructing Amelia: A Novel
Author: Kimberly McCreight
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Summary: A Manhattan lawyer in the middle of an important meeting gets a call that her 15 year old daughter has just been suspended from school and needs to be picked up.  The single mom leaves to pick up her daughter only to find out when she gets to school that her daughter is dead from suicide.  A mysterious text message suggests that she didn't commit suicide but was actually pushed.  This leads the grieving mom to investigate and uncover the terrifying bullying her daughter was going through before her death.

My review:  I seem to be reading a lot of books lately about either Manhattan or suicides that aren't.  One of the next books I'll be reviewing is about the latter, but I need a break from suicides that are murders.  Anyway, I'm still working out my rating system.  I liked this book a lot.  Does this mean it gets 4 stars?  Or 5?  If I give it 4, I might have to re-rank one of my previous 4 stars to a 3.  Oh the conundrums of a reviewer.  I don't want to give out too many fives, you know?

Anyway, the book. Amelia is the girl that dies.  She went to an expensive high school in Brooklyn and was tapped to be in a secret club.  I have a weakness for stories about rich people and the spoiled and entitled people they spawn.  But this was also a story about a single mom and her teenage daughter and how they basically grew up together.  Their relationship wasn't perfect, but I liked how close they were--it was them against the world.  The mom is devastated to learn of her daughter's death, as any mom would.  The bullying aspect was horrific, but unfortunately it wasn't too far off of some real-life bullying stories that have been in the media the last few years.  The book ends about as well as one could expect it to--the mom finds out the truth but of course it won't bring her daughter back.