Review - Amelia Anne is Dead and Gone

Amelia Anne is Dead and Gone by Kat Rosenfield
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Amelia Anne is dead and gone but she apparently left behind her thesaurus because her story was quite adjective-alicious. But, once I waded through the overabundance of metaphors and descriptive prose, it was a fairly ok read....until the last 30 or so pages. That ending was bullshit. I was so angry about the fact that I had been drawn in to the suspense of this murder/mystery only to be rewarded with some half ass muddle-muck of an ending. Not to mention that it just WOULD NOT, COULD NOT logically have happened that way.

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If someone is beat in the head with a tire iron and then repeatedly bludgeoned around the face and body, I refuse to believe they would be coherent enough to correctly analyze the extent of their injuries enough to know they are dying and then request that a complete stranger that suddenly appears out of the bushes on a dark road in the middle of the night finish the job and kill them. There is NO WAY IN HELL that, once he confesses to killing her (and explains that it was at her request), hiding evidence, interfering with and investigation, etc, the state would give him only probation for it after deciding that she would have died in another hour anyway. I'm sure SOMEBODY would have suggested that perhaps calling an ambulance might have been a better choice in the situation. Even with our screwy justice system, this could not have possibly played out like this. I know of a girl in the town where I grew up who went to PRISON for 3 years for taking her car to a car wash the day after her husband murdered someone. And she had nothing to do with the actual murder but her ass was still charged with accessory after the fact or some such thing. So it's just not a plausible or even a logical ending

This less than perfect ending, the overly descriptive writing, and the fact that I found the main character, Becca, to be utterly unlikable, left me a rather grumpy reader after finishing this book. I guess one could look at it as Becca was a "flawed" main character, but I just thought she was nothing but angst and asshattery. This is an example of some of her "personality"

"Rebecca Williams?"
"That's me," I said, hoisting my backpack. The fat girl-whose named turned out to be, hilariously, Bonnie Biggs-smiled and waved at me.

Ugh. Needless to say, I did not enjoy Amelia Anne is Dead and Gone and certainly don't recommend it. However, there are other people who thought that this was a wonderful story and if you're at all curious about this book, take a look at Wendy's review here for another perspective.




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