Amelia Anne is Dead and Gone – Kat Rosenfield
Earlier this year, John Corley Whaley’s Where Things Come Back won both the William C. Morris debut book
award and the Michael Printz Award for Excellence in Y.A. Literature. Not too
shabby for a first time novelist, eh? Part of what made the book stand out was
the way Whaley told two seemingly different stories – one involving the
disappearance of a fifteen year old boy, the other the suicide of a once God-fearing
college student who’s lost his faith - that later intersect into a ‘oh, wow’
climax. In Amelia Anne is Dead and Gone,
Rosenfield pulls off a similar feat…only, I think, better.
Amelia Anne is Dead
and Gone starts off with a bang – well, actually, it starts with two recent
high school graduates banging in the
back of a pick-up truck. No sooner are they finished, the sweat still on Becca’s
body, when James informs Becca, ‘By the way, we’re done. Over.’ Oooo, burn. That
same night across town, a college-age girl is bludgeoned and left for dead by
the side of an old country road. Her body isn’t discovered until the next
morning when a local townsperson comes up on her dead form, actually driving
over and crushing a few of her fingers. As you can now see…this isn’t light
reading, kiddos.
As in Where Things
Come Back, AAiDaG takes place in
a small town, and as Rosenfield writes, “In a small town, murder is
three-dimensional…[Amelia’s death] blew alongside the flecks of bloodstained
dirt, down Country Road 128, and reached town as a howling gale. The chatter
was fevered. Frenzied. People came home from the grocery store, from bridge
club, from a walk in the park, and massaged jaw joints that were exhausted from
gossiping. They stood over fences and talked about the dead girl, the girl with
no name, no face, no identification. “
The thing is, this dead girl has a name for the reader –
Amelia. After first meeting her in death, Rosenfield takes us back to meet
Amelia as she’s finishing her last semester of college. It’s during that last
term that she takes part in a school stage production and discovers she really
likes acting – even the director agrees, she has true talent. Her boyfriend,
Luke, finds it all silly that she would seriously consider abandoning her
business degree to try and pursue a career in acting. Besides, he already has
plans for them – plans for them to marry and settle down.
Meanwhile, Rosenfield also lets us get to know the story of
Becca and James and how they arrived at their messy breakup. The two first get
together the summer before their junior year of high school. What starts out as
a small hook-up, nothing serious, soon blossoms though Becca and James are on
different paths. Most townies are happy enough to graduate, maybe go to the local
community college, but for the most part people settle in town where they live
out the rest of their days. Becca plans for more. She plans to go away to
college, never come back…but then she falls for James. Poor James is dealing
with tragedy of his own – the death of his mother to cancer, a death so
crippling to him, that he drops out of school and almost out of life except for
his ties to Becca. When he breaks up with Becca the night of Amelia’s murder,
he thinks he is finally cutting ties with her.
The death of the strange girl quickly consumes the town and
even Becca, who wants James back and reconsiders going away to college. But then
facts about the girl’s death start to come out, and Becca starts to suspect
someone close to her and James. Even James is acting all weirded about the girl’s
death, like he might know something. As the accusations and finger-pointing in
town start to fly, Rosenfield slowly reveals what really happened the night
Amelia met death – and it’s as ugly, gruesome and sad as any death of a
promising young person could be.
Rosenfield is an amazing writer who totally gets the nuances
of life in a small town right. Morever, she knows how to build suspense to the
point you’ll have to remind yourself to breathe. There’s another side story,
about the death several years back of a young fifteen –year-old boy visiting
town named Brendan, that tore me up about as bad as Amelia’s story. I could see
where she was going with his impending death and found myself wanting to just
skip to the next chapter to avoid reading such sadness. She is THAT good of a
writer.
This book first came on my radar when author John Green (The Fault in Our Stars, Looking for Alaska,
Paper Towns) tweeted about its awesomeness. Obviously, the dark themes in
this book mean it’s not for everyone. Also, while it is a young adult book, the
high school librarian in me sees it more as an adult than young book. There are
a couple of explicit (for Y.A.) sex scenes and rough language, but it befits
the story. Just sayin’ – consider yourself informed.
