September 2018 Book Club - Reconstructing Amelia

I really liked it but I've been reading a lot of serious terrorism crime novels so I needed a break. MrsEm you are right in all your assumptions imho. I would say that Dylan was autistic/aspergers or somewhere on the spectrum. Whatever she had, she was lacking in social skills and how to relate to people. My daughter is borderline and she has had a lot of that. Was Zadie in love with her? probably. I'd say the whole school was pretty f'd up because that kind of parental money Talks Big Time. Liv seemed like an overgrown girl who wanted to be cool more than she wanted to be an adult with integrity and poor old Mom wasn't all that Mom-like either. As a big bucks professional she sure didn't have much awareness of what it meant to be a parent. Spoilers

 

@MrsEm I stayed up TOO late reading (until my nook died!) and then had 3 lovely hours at the tire shop today to finish this one up & I agree with you on ALL points. (even the draggin' today!)

Spoilers: I felt a bit like there was no real revelation- I sorta thought it was Sylvia too- she was so mean! I also wish more went into Dylan's 'condition' as it would have added more to the story. I think the last bit of the book was trying to get to the end too fast! I did want more of an 'happy ending' as far as where are they now sort of deal. I was talking to my husband about all the stuff that goes on that parents had no clue about & it seriously scared me. While I don't work full time, I'm still away. I guess I need to start beating it into my kids' head to always talk to an adult! Yikes. /end

 

I will start this one today or tomorrow morning. Depending on my productivity of today. Which is probably not going to be great, since it's already 10:30 and I am still in PJs.
I will be reading this one in Dutch though, so that hopefully means it will be a quicker read for me than The Great Alone.

I have to say, I'm not super excited about it judging from the blurb. But I'm willing to give it a fair shot!

 

ok i'm a couple chapters in and i can see it going in like half a dozen different directions - y'know like everyone you meet's a suspect in a whodunnit - so if you could see the end coming @southernmother already, good on you Amber - you should be a detective or something!

 

I'm not the only one who suspected how it would go. It was predictable from the get-go imho.

 

Ok, I finished this on a lazy Sunday... and I couldn't see where it was going at any time, I must have watched the wrong who dunnits as a child
I loved it but I can also see quite a few flaws esp in the fact that I really didn't like any of the main characters except Amelia ...
more thoughts when I get them together

 

I finished this last night too & I was still guessing to the end, & agree it was above my Scooby Doo gang level but I was satisfied with the way it wrapped up because looking back it was plausible

- will be back to read the white bits in thread later (too hard on phone!)

 

Ok i'm back and read the white stuff and here's my white stuff:

Now that you point if out, yep i did wonder what happened to Dylan after all that - Zadie got put in a different school and the mum was off the school board but i was confused about the phone call Liv was taking on the roof just before the end - was that to do with a potential book deal or was she trying to publish Amelia's work as her own or was it that the special conference or whatever that Amelia had been allowed to go to, if Woodhouse signed off on it, was taking back their invitation based on the cheating allegation etc? Dylan I assumed was sort of Asperger's based on her suduko prowess and i thought that the Gracefully bit about her with ?Matthew was based on a rumour Zadie circulated to try to save Dylan's reputation?? (i could have added that bit in my own head!) No idea why but the way Gracefully was typed with the mixed case, i kept thinking it would have been written by someone with initials R.C. - i kept flicking back thru my paperback trying to find people that commented on the facebook posts with initials like that - there was a Chloe and a Carter etc so if that was a red herring, i fell for it!

I never saw that Adele getting back at Kate via manipulating Zadie thing coming and I don't get why Sylvia sent anonymous texts to kate that Amelia didn't jump to begin with - i get that was her way of dealing with guilt of seeing Kate at so much of a loss but did she just assumed that they wouldn't figure out she sent them or that she was the reason Amelia fell or that there'd be no consequences? It all felt a bit Days of Our Lives drama-wise but was harrowing nonetheless - and i thought it was going to turn out Ben was Dylan or Liv - I was just all kinds of wrong but it was still engaging and i'm still pretty satisfied with the end, although a chapter by Detective Lew or Woodhouse might have helped round it out


OK done.

 

So I'm in for like one third and I'm really struggling with this book. It might be the fact that I'm reading the dutch translation. This translation is just too literal and therefor very annoying, I keep thinking 'yes, this works in english but sounds super ugly in dutch, come on!'.
Also I really don't like the way this is written. There is too many sidetracks and I'm really struggling to keep interested. I actually haven't been reading for a couple of days and that is not normal for me. It's because it's not grabbing me yet.

 

I often wonder about the effect translation has on Netflix shows (I can't read in another language well enough to read a book so I haven't thought about it in the same way as you but I do always admire how many non native English speakers are active in the forum here _ Even Aussie English confuses some of the other English speakers!) It always strikes me as funny if I can understand some of a phrase on a show & the subtitle doesn't actually translate them same (but I just assume I didn't translate right myself, especially with dialects & stuff)
Feel free to DNF ( Did Not Finish) if it's that painful!

 

This is very normal and you are probably correct.

The thing with subtitles is that they have to be short and come quick. So long difficult sentences are a pain to translate into subs. People will not be able to follow along and that is part of why they aren’t often not exactly correct. When I taught special ed., I couldn’t use videos with subs because they couldn’t follow along as quickly. They could read, but not that fast. This is a huge thing we keep brushing over in a country where we only sub shows, not dub. (But I don’t want to watch dubbed shows!)
Another reason is that the translator is often not specialised enough to understand what’s happening. For example baking shows are often completely off when they translate ingredients or the bake. They translate the literal words and end up with non-existing items. Some things are better left in their original language.
A third reason is that literal translation often does not work. We have a saying in Dutch that translates to “make that the cat wise”. Does not make sense in English but every single person in my country understands. And this is just one example. When I translate my journaling I usually say “loosely translated”.

So if I’m watching English shows, I often opt out of the translation or just ignore most of it. But I cannot do that with most languages. Which is the reason I only watch certain shows early in the evening when I still am motivated to read the subs.

 

I think that's a very good point @Karen about Amelia being outwardly bad and thus 'too obvious' to be the bad guy. I don't normally ever guess endings, so it was a shock to me for the bad guy to be so obviously... a bad guy. And ugh gross, I also got creeper vibes between Zadie and her stepdad. End

 

@Karen re: naively hoping and new HS parent - i think that was the hook for me in reading the plot of this book & why it was on my TBR list- i know girls are different to some extent than boys but i live in naive hope as well & DD's phone broke bout 3 weeks ago (total coincidenec in timing - the battery wouldn't charge and the whole thing just wouldn't turn on and even switching sim's, we didn't have a spare phone that could handle the network requirements - 2G,3G and now it's all 4G here with the forced upgrades in technology) and i admit to not being in a hurry to replace it after this book - she has other devices and there are always work arounds but it feels like one less thing to deal with (except if i'm running late and need to message her!)

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