Reconstructing Amelia Sparknotes

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Recommended: The history of the portrayal of women in literature

Has someone said or done something that has been a surprise in any way? I have been reading Reconstructing Amelia by Kimberly McCreight and finished the 385-page novel. Amelia has been accused of cheating on her English paper, which bewilders her mother due to the fact that Amelia is a superb writer. Amelia has joined a sorority which has her knee deep in secrets and lies including a secret boy whom only Scarlet, her best friend, knows merely about. Throughout the book the question is about Amelia’s abrupt death, and the messages Kate is getting that Amelia’s death was not a suicide like the police had alleged. With deep secrets and anonymous messages the truth is discovered and is downright unexpected. In this journal I will be visualizing, …show more content…

Kimberly McCreight is an author of colorful detail and visuals that are exhibited through the whole book. One of these moments are when Kate, Amelia’s mother, is going through the things Amelia left behind in her room when she died after supposedly vaulting to her death from the school roof. Kimberly McCreight explains the smell of the room so vividly, it almost seems as if you are Kate creeping into Amelia’s room and witnessing the pain. She explains, “When she stepped inside and flipped on the light, the air smell stale. Like death. Like Amelia had died right there, in that room, and her body had been left there to rot (McCreight 74-75). When I read this short paragraph it gave me the chills and made it feel tangible. For a second, I was put into the shoes of a devastated mother who had just lost her daughter and then had to encounter the grief that was trapped behind the door of Amelia’s room. I can only think what was going through her mind. Breathe. Open the door. Breathe. Open your eyes. Breathe. ☺ This event in the book was only a glimpse of the visuals I received from reading this …show more content…

There were many things that I evaluated throughout the time I read this book, but I found it very intriguing to look deeper into who Amelia was as a person before she got involved with the Maggies. Amelia was the girl who was always found with a stack of books in her arms waiting to be read and re-read. She was never one to be clandestine and hide things from her best friend or her mother. Amelia’s image is best stated in a quote that the author makes about Amelia’s life and how people viewed her as a person. Kimberly pronounces, “Amelia wasn’t the kind of girl people hated. She was smart and pretty and athletic. A girl people might have been jealous of, if she wasn’t so fundamentally modest. She didn’t go around trying to draw attention to herself the way Sylvia did. How could someone possibly hate her?” (McCreight 86). She was intelligent, humble, and unique☺ in all of the ways that made her likable to everyone that knew her. In this book Amelia was that person that nobody really could forget. She lived as a girl minding her own business and trying to get by with her best friend by her

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