Amelia Anne is Dead and Gone By Kat Rosenfield

Becca has just graduated HS and she's one summer away from getting out of her small town.  But when the boyfriend she assumed she would leave behind tries to leave her first and an unknown girl is found dead on the same night, she doesn't know what her future holds anymore.  

Amelia has just graduated college and has her whole life ahead of her, until she winds up dead on the side of the road in a desolate small town.  This is the story of these two girls who end up different, but maybe weren't so different after all.

Ok this book, this book, how do I talk about this book? It's really hard to talk about a book that I had mixed emotions on. Firstly the writing style annoyed me, but by the middle I was used to it and it only bugged me at certain points from there on.

 It was written very descriptively, beautiful at times, but overdone at others. Adjectives galore!! What started to annoy me the most towards the end was that I realized that without all the descriptions and mood-settings, there wasn't much of a story. Ok, an unknown girl was found dead in a small town... another girl was leaving town soon to start college. That's pretty much it. I kept wondering why Becca kept thinking and stressing about the girl that was dead. If she was afraid about there being a killer on the loose, that would make sense. But she seemed to be more focused on the gory details of how the dead girl looked. (She never saw the dead girl, so all the descriptions of milky white eyes staring into nothingness was just her imagination).

At the same time, the book was slightly addicting. I would be so annoyed by a long winded description of how sunlight came into the house choking everything with it's brightness and hearing about all the surfaces it touched, but then if I would stop reading I would be like so what's going on in that book? It was weird because usually I would not want to go back.

Basically, what I'm saying is this was not a book where someone could just walk across the yard and start talking to someone. No, when someone walked across the yard they noticed all the sights and smells and what those sights and smells reminded them of or what the meaning of it all was before they could ever actually get to talk to someone. And somehow most of those descriptions were beautiful... but some of them I could've lived without and had the author increased the plot content.

Becca also confused me in that at first she was pretty eager to get out of this town, but then it was like the fact that there was a dead body found was somehow going to suck her in and she would never be able to leave?? I was a little puzzled. If there was this whole 'who killed the dead girl' drama going on in my town, it would make me want to leave not stay forever. Just because someone you don't know gets killed it's not going affect your life to the point where you feel as though you have no future. I just didn't get it. But I kind of liked that I didn't get it because it gave me something to really think about.

OVERALL: It's a cool book that I would probably have to read twice to fully understand all the little things in it. It had a lot of potential, but it didn't quite get there for me.  I'm curious to see what this author writes next.   It's not a light, easy read for sure... more for the writers-reader. 

P.S. - I actually DIDN'T read the ending before I got there, so that's saying something for this book :)

Date Published: 7/5/2012
How I Got This Book: Library
Publisher: Dutton Children's (Penguin)

Add it to your To-Read List!

My Rating: 3/5