Review by Sarah Porterfield

I guess I, like so many of us, am a complete sucker for “the next big thing”: the second I heard Kimberly McCreight’s newly-released novel Reconstructing Amelia praised as the Gone Girl of this summer, I immediately—as in, within minutes—found myself pre-ordering it on Amazon. I wasn’t quite as obsessed with Gone Girl as I think the majority of the readers in our country became, but I liked it. A lot. I read it in that oh-so-rare, I-can’t-wait-to-get-in-bed-so-I-can-read kind of way.

I expected the same from Reconstructing Amelia, a thrilling tale about a hyperintelligent 15-year-old girl who throws herself off her high school’s roof after being caught plagiarizing a paper on Virginia Woolf. Amelia’s workaholic single mother, Kate, is sent into a nail-biting journey of who-what-when-where and why after receiving a simple, menacing text after her daughter’s death that reads: “Amelia didn’t jump.”

Amelia and Kate alternate narrating chapters, slowly revealing the truth behind their (on the surface) idyllic, Manhattan, ritzy life.

Amelia is chosen for one of Grace Hall’s secret societies, falls in love for the first time and has a secret pen pal, none of which she tells her rarely-there mom. Kate, constantly guilty over her daughter’s lack of family life, deals with her daughter’s apparent suicide by taking the investigation into her own hands in a very 2013-way, going through all of her texts and e-mails, not to mention wading through the hateful blog gRaCeFULLY that details the gossip at Amelia’s prep school.

I won’t reveal more; like Gone Girl, Reconstructing Amelia holds twists that would be all too easy to spoil in one plot detail.

It all sounds a little Gossip Girl-meets-CSI on the surface, but Reconstructing Amelia seamlessly blends a crime story with a touching relationship drama about a mother and her devotion to her daughter. It’s Gossip Girl without the silliness, CSI without the cheesy just-for-effect tricks.

In her debut novel, author McCreight somehow made me think about the perils of working-mom guilt, bullying, police corruption and Gossip Girl. That’s no easy feat.

I don’t know if Reconstructing Amelia is the Gone Girl of summer 2013, but I can promise you this: you will be gone for however long it takes you to uncover its secrets.