Amelia Anne is Dead and Gone

Amelia Anne is Dead and Gone by Kat Rosenfield
3/5 stars
Dutton Books, 2012
277 pages
YA Contemporary Mystery

Source: Received from Jen Ryland/YA Romantics

I got this from Jen Ryland, whose review I found intriguing.  However I'm not sure she hammered this point home: the book is hella depressing. It opens with a pending death and with the ending of the first person narrator's dignity. As it progresses, the mood does not pick up. Instead we are sucked into the life of a very small town, seeing how one can become an insider and how one can escape but very rarely how one manages to do either.

See that death was a brutal murder of an unidenitifed woman and that loss of dignity precipitates a huge shake in confidence to Becca. She always figured she would get out of her suffocating town but that prologue rattles her and she is further thrown by the murder. Now that which she thought she knew is dead and gone.

The writing style further adds to the depressing tone with carefully chosen words and phrases. It felt very literary to me in comparison to some of the more plot-drive YA novels I've read. This could be a good read for the older end of YA due to some of the language and topics.

Overall: While I can admire the poetry of the writing, the story is not one I can love and thus this was not the book for me.

Cover: So those are her knees, which kept throwing me. I'm not really a fan of covers with weird angles that confuse me but the starkness of the font over the cover is very in keeping with the tone of the novel.