Amelia Anne is Dead and Gone

The pro of having a Twitter account is that you can win books from publishers, such as Amelia Anne is Dead and Gone (published by Dutton, a division of Penguin.).

As the title suggests, Amelia Anne is Dead and Gone is about a dead girl named Amelia Anne but it’s so much more than that. Told in a lyrical and poetical fashion, Amelia Anne Is Dead and Gone tells the parallel stories of two girls, who’s lives are connected and are on the brink of a new stage in their lives.

Becca just graduated out of high school, and she’s eager to escape the small stifling town that’s she’s lived in for her whole entire life. However, it’s summer, so she must wait out three more months before she can truly escape. The small town dynamics are shaken up by the dead body of a girl on the side of a road. Who killed her? Who is she?

Becca says,

“In a small town, murder is three-dimensional. We make it that way, elevating it and turning it over until it’s more than a simple tragedy, until it becomes tangible. Murder in a small town is always more than a paragraph in the local paper. In a place so insulated, where lives are so small and gone about so quietly, violent death hangs in the air- tinting everything crimson, weaving itself into the shimmering heat that rises off the winding asphalt roads at noon. It oozes from taps and runs through the gas pumps. It sits at the diner table, murmuring in urgent low tones under the clinking of glassware.

Switching back and forth between two narrators, the novel tells the stories of two very different girls, a high school graduate and a college graduate. Their lives cannot be anymore different, but they’re still similar. It’s this similarity that makes the whole novel cohesive and deeply alluring. They’re both going through a relationship- its ups and downs, and figuring out their destinies.

I actually put off reading this book since my TBR (To Be Read) pile was about to bury me, but I’m so annoyed that I put off reading this book. This book, with its soft prose and deep profoundness about coming of age and growing up captured my mind. The themes of finding yourself, your destiny, and what you stand for resonated deeply with me.

It’s not just the themes of the book that resonated with me. It’s the writing, too. The writing was amazing, for a lack of a better word. It was so lyrical, filled with so many images. It was poetic! It was a lot of things that I don’t know how to put into words. It was so utter amazing and addicting that I found it hard to put down.

In the end though, the story is a story about two girls growing up and confronting fate. The author, Kat Rosenfield paints such a vivid picture of the girls and makes the characters so believable that at times, I think I’m the character, too.

Review copy provided by the publisher

Random thought: Is it a little too late that I just noticed that the cover was of two legs?

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