This book was a July book club book, and I wanted to get some of my thoughts down before the meeting, then maybe if something great comes up during the discussion, I will add on.
When I first put the book down, I would have given it a 3.9 or 4, but the longer I thought about it and also read other reviews here online, my rating dropped. I think my final rating is about a 2.5.

I liked this book and thought it was good. Not great, not the Jodi Picoult experience the front proclaims, but still I wasn’t bored and to me it wasn’t obvious what the solution was until the end. The blurb says “Fans of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl will find Reconstructing Amelia just as gripping and surprising” which I think is an overstatement. Wasn’t this also being said about Girl on a Train, too? Overall, the pacing was decent and I cared about Amelia enough to want to know what had happened to her. This book follows a somewhat standard format for solving the ‘why did it happen and exactly how’ type of mystery, and I don’t think that was a bad thing!

One issue I had that I don’t normally have was with the time jumps. Despite all Facebook updates and texts being date stamped, it took a while for me to get the hang of the dates and determine what the timeline(s) were. Another way that the author could have made this timeline would be some sort of number line with the death as 0. Though this would have been hard for Amelia’s dates, it would have been a bit easier seeing the “countdown” coming toward her and for seeing still how fresh and recent the death is for Kate. Along the same lines, the very old emails and diary entries from Kate in the late 90s were distracting and ultimately I didn’t think they added to the book or characters.

I think that one of the author’s intentions was to have multiple mysteries all happening at once: 1) was it suicide or foul play? 1b) if foul play, what exactly happened? 1c) if murder/harmful intent, who did it and why? 2) who was Amelia’s father? 3) who were all the people involved in texting both women and why? 4) who is Ben? 5) what has Kate done that she appears to be a big motivation behind what’s happened to Amelia?
Obviously number 1 and its parts are the biggest plot point and the other questions sort of support this driving force, but for me it started to bog down. I’m not a huge mystery buff, so most of my experience with the genre are simpler shorter stories, like Agatha Christie. So I know it’s a tradition to have a number of plots all happening at once, such that as the reader proceeds, the suspicion is cast all around and every character seems to have motives. But I sort of didn’t care about who Amelia’s father was, and I really didn’t want the reason for her death to be because of who that was. (spoilers) I was glad that that wasn’t it, but I still thought that Amelia dealt with her questions of his identity weirdly and that Kate was also a bit cagey on the subject when she didn’t need to be.

Character development was great for Amelia. I got to know her feelings and thoughts and I felt that in general there was a full picture of her personality. However the other characters were all pretty thin and felt stock, including Kate. My initial impression with Kate was positive, I felt a lot of sympathy for this woman trying to juggle the lawyer responsibilities and stresses with those of single motherhood, and then suddenly having her beloved only daughter die. But as time went by, Kate’s actions made less and less sense, and there were a couple of instances where I wanted to shake Kate for her stupidity! She should know better than to barge in and do so much investigating and questioning of her own. How the lieutenant Lew put up with her I have no idea. Kate was stupid and her emotions were all over the place (which is understandable) but I felt that her feelings and actions were more being used as plot devices. I know this book wasn’t a study of a mother’s grief, but a little self reflection would have gone a long way to demonstrate Kate’s mental state and also enforce the reasons why she is pursuing the idea that it was not a suicide.

I’m not sure why Gone Girl was the big hit that it was, other than I think people were so surprised by the “twist” and the nature of the characters that it was able to hit just right. Plus the money they poured into the marketing/advertising certainly didn’t hurt. Anyway, Reconstructing Amelia in my opinion lacked the driving suspense and action that was Gone Girl, and it also doesn’t have the moral/ethical backbone that is a primary feature in so many of Jodi Picoult’s books.
This was a good book, enjoyable, but also frustrating and a little lazy on the character development. Also, bullying as the central topic and the horrible things that were happening to Amelia and by the Magpies was a good source of tension for this book, but I didn’t feel that Amelia was upset enough about what what going on to her, and this theme has been done repeatedly (it feels like).

Book club discussion was great, everyone had an opinion and the meeting could have continued for another easy 20 minutes! Bullying was a major topic, and I felt a little like the pessimist for always bringing up the weaker points of the book (as I’ve already discussed above). Most others enjoyed the reading experience and rated it highly. Our average rating was close to that on Goodreads: about 3.8.