Shelby's Teach This Mystery Novel

Teach This Mystery Novel

Reconstructing Amelia—by Kimberly McCreight

            Presented as a duel narrative, Reconstructing Amelia follows the present day narrative of Kate, and the flashback narrative of Amelia. Kate, the workaholic lawyer and single parent of Amelia has constantly struggled with her ability to juggle the demands of her job and the demands of being a single parent. Recently, Kate has felt even more detached from Amelia. At fifteen-years-old, Amelia has become more secretive, a trait that Kate reluctantly accepts as her teenager’s coming-of-age coping mechanism. Kate thought she understood her daughter as well as any parent knows their teenager until she saw the cop cars at Amelia’s school: Amelia jumped off the roof of the building. Amelia was dead. Kate pleaded with the police to investigate Amelia’s death, she refused to believe that Amelia would commit suicide—whatever problems Amelia was dealing with, suicide was not in her character. Finally, Kate gets the confirmation she needed in an anonymous text message, “Amelia didn’t jump.” With law enforcement still denying her evidence, Kate enlists the help of her detective friend, Seth, to reveal the truth of her daughter’s death. By examining text messages, blog posts, and social media sites, Kate reconstructs the last few days of Amelia’s life, revealing Amelia’s struggle to cope with her absentee father, cyber bulling, and homosexuality. Understanding the truth of Amelia’s death, Kate discovers the daughter she never knew she had, and must preserve the memory of the daughter she could not save.

Why Should I Teach This Text?

            Using a mystery novel in the classroom is a great way to peek student interest and encourage critical thinking skills. In their book Young Adult Literature: Exploration, Evaluation, and Appreciation, Bucher and Hinton explain that a good book in this genre will encourage “reasoning and problem solving, as well as questioning and examining evidence, fact, and motives” as well as “explor[ing] values and social morality” (165). In this way, a good mystery is a great way to introduce students to the idea of looking for contextual evidence to support their claim as well as understanding the complexities of human emotion. Kimberly McCreight’s novel Reconstructing Amelia is a valuable mystery for the classroom because it is more than a simple “whodunit.” By considering Reconstructing Amelia as a teachable text, students will benefit from a complex mystery that simultaneously engages students with relatable topics such as homosexuality, cyber bullying, nontraditional families, and vicious peer pressure as well as providing an easily digestible introduction to postmodern form.

 By frequently asking students to determine the outcome of the novel with each additional reading, students will develop a greater understanding of how to properly support a claim with specific contextual evidence, as well as how to effectively change their interpretation when presented with new information. Reconstructing Amelia has embedded clues such as text messages, blog posts, and Facebook statuses throughout its dual narrative, giving the reader the ability to join Kate as an amateur sleuth. Unlike classic mystery novels like Sherlock Holmes and The Moonstone, Reconstructing Amelia’s digital inclusion is much more likely to engage the young reader because the book “speaks their language” while still asking them to look for patterns and connect the dots to figure out what happened to Amelia.

Where Reconstructing Amelia may fail in multiculturalism, the novel makes up for these shortcomings by addressing a myriad of universal challenges faced by all young adult readers that will most definitely inspire each individual student to relate, reflect, and challenge their perceptions of the social construct. Issues like cyber bullying, peer pressure, absentee parents, and homosexuality are colorblind and will thereby be more likely to reach the entirety of the class in a way that a novel focusing on the struggles of an African American student will not. This is not to say that studies in multiculturalism are not significant, but only teaching novels centered on one particular issue may alienate the majority of the student population from having a direct connection to the text; therefore I would suggest that all teachers consider using at least one book (or other text) such as Reconstructing Amelia alongside multicultural texts to ensure your classroom content resonates personally with every student in some way. By presenting these universal problems, Kimberly McCreight’s novel goes beyond the normal boundaries of a mystery novel and explores a genre that Bucher and Hinton refer to as “realistic fiction.” Bucher and Hinton explain that this genre is particularly beneficial to young adults because it attempts “to make meaning out of a number of related events in ways that present young adult readers with new ideas, add new depths to their lives, and allow them to see themselves in new ways” (126). Sifting through the digital trail left by Amelia, Kate discovers that her daughter was forced to post nude pictures of herself on the internet in a desperate attempt to join a particular ‘clique’ at her school. Though it is unlikely that many students will be experiencing something this severe, it is safe to assume that many students will experience some type of “friend initiation,” or just feel an overwhelming desire to be accepted. This could also be a good opportunity to discuss why teenagers feel the need to be accepted by certain groups, the morality of groups that require an “initiation” as well as warn students about the permanent nature of the internet. Bucher and Hinton say that a mystery novel should “[explore] values and social morality” (165), consider asking students why values and social morality seem to be different in high school. Kate also discovers that her daughter had been secretly dating another girl at her school. Amelia’s homosexuality is only a small portion of the novel and I would not consider this a “gay text,” but it is an important topic to cover with high school students and the context in which it is presented in Reconstructing Amelia is important. Amelia never “came out” to her mother. She kept her relationship and her sexuality secret her entire life. Because this book is only narrated in the present time from Kate’s perspective, the reader only gets to see the outcome of a distraught mother who wishes that her daughter would have told her. It is implied that Amelia thought that her mother “just wouldn’t understand.” How many high school students don’t tell their parents things because they assume the parent won’t understand? Probably all of them. It is also revealed that Amelia had been having secret contact with a man who thinks he may be Amelia’s father. Kate had an unplanned pregnancy and raised Amelia alone from the day she was born and therefore the communication between the two came to Kate as a complete shock. The novel also leads the reader to believe that a lot of Amelia’s subordination towards Kate is due to her mother’s secrecy regarding her parentage. It is likely to assume that many students, from every different background will be able to understand Amelia’s broken-home frustration. Reconstructing Amelia also follows a series of blog posts where a high school girl is relaying every piece of school gossip, including relationship statuses, embarrassing situations, and even gossip regarding school faculty. The point here is that there is enough happening in this book that everyone should relate to some degree, Reconstructing Amelia is not just about a white girl from New York, it is about high school.

When discussing what text to use in the classroom, teachers often forget that the format of the text itself can be just as beneficial to high school students as content. Aside from state standards in argumentative essays and genre, educators will also be required to teach students how to identify postmodern form which is, conveniently, the structure used in Reconstructing Amelia.  In their book Teaching Young Adult Literature, Bean, Bean, and Harper define postmodern form as a text that “generally include[s] font shifts, point-of-view shifts, [and] mixed genres within a single novel” (213). McCreight’s novel presents font shifts to distinguish between different media formats, point-of-view shifts between Amelia and Kate, as well as the aforementioned blend of the mystery and realistic fiction genres. Furthermore, the shifting viewpoints between Kate and Amelia are a great way to help students recognize narrative structure because Kate’s narrative is entirely from the third person perspective while Amelia’s is from the first. It is important to keep these formatting and technical aspects in mind when choosing a book, for it may provide a valuable way to pack multiple state standards into one lesson and make an effective use of the 2+3 lesson plan system.

Picking a text for classroom use will be one of the most challenging tasks an English teacher faces every year. In order to ensure a successful text, teachers should be looking at text complexity, student interest, relatability, and a plethora of state standards that could be applied to a single reading. For these reasons, I highly recommend Kimberly McCreight’s Reconstructing Amelia as a viable, teachable text.

How to Teach This Text:

Connecting Amelia to Virginia Woolf

Throughout the novel, Amelia is constantly updating her Facebook status with Virgina Woolf quotes, including (but not limited to) quotes from A Room of One’s Own (225), Mrs. Dalloway (310), To the Lighthouse (362), and The Waves (376). These references provide the teacher a great opportunity to tie this YAL text to the literary canon. In groups, have students pick one of the Virginia Woolf texts referenced by Amelia and ask then to determine why that text, and that particular quote, may have been significant to Amelia. Amelia obviously shares a personal connection with the work of Virginia Woolf. Why? Students will present the Virginia Woolf text of their choice to the rest of the class and explain its significance and relevance to Reconstructing Amelia.

Group Detective Board

Put students in groups at the very beginning of the book. This will be their “investigative team” throughout the novel. Each team will be required to constantly pull contextual evidence throughout the novel to determine what happened to Amelia. This is including, but not limited to, the frequent blog posts, text messages, and Amelia’s testimony leading up to her death. Students will be asked to describe different characters and determine possible motive. This information will be constructed into a group detective board (see photo). The group detective board is a fun and interesting way to get students involved in the novel’s smallest details while also serving as a graphic organizer. Graphic organizers are much more fun if the student doesn’t realize they are simply filling out a graphic organizer.

Peripheral Characters and Creative Writing

Due to the novel’s postmodern format, Reconstructing Amelia offers the point-of-view of both Amelia and Kate, but what about everyone else’s perspective? Students will write a chapter from the point-of-view of a character who is not given a narrative voice. Students will be allowed to write either a “with the grain” or “against the grain” reading, but must be able to defend their character’s narrative with supporting evidence from the original text. With their new chapter, students will be asked to write a paragraph explaining why they wrote their chapter. These chapters will then be made into a “classroom compilation” titled Deconstructing Amelia, in which the class will be able to read everyone’s chapter and have a subsequent group discussing about how they feel this chapter works with the overall novel.  

Work Cited

Bean, Thomas W., Judith Dunkerly-Bean, and Helen J. Harper. Teaching Young Adult       Literature: Developing Students as World Citizens. Print.

McCreight, Kimberly. Reconstructing Amelia. New York: Harper, 2013. Print

Short, Katherine Bucher and KaaVonia Hinton. Young Adult Literature: Exploration,        Evaluation, and Appreciation. 3rd ed. Boston: Pearson, 2014. Print.