Amelia Unabridged Published by Wednesday Books by Ashley Schumacher
on February 16, 2021
Genres: Books About Books, Contemporary, Mystery, Realistic, Romance, YA
Pages: 306
Source: Netgalley
Format: ARC, eBook
Find the Author: Website, Twitter, Goodreads
Find the Book: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Goodreads
ISBN: 1250253020
Rating:
Sparks fly between two teens as they grapple with grief, love, and the future.
Eighteen-year-old Amelia Griffin is obsessed with the famous Orman Chronicles, written by the young and reclusive prodigy N. E. Endsley. They’re the books that brought her and her best friend Jenna together after Amelia’s father left and her family imploded. So when Amelia and Jenna get the opportunity to attend a book festival with Endsley in attendance, Amelia is ecstatic. It’s the perfect way to start off their last summer before college.
In a heartbeat, everything goes horribly wrong. When Jenna gets a chance to meet the author and Amelia doesn’t, the two have a blowout fight like they’ve never experienced. And before Amelia has a chance to mend things, Jenna is killed in a freak car accident. Grief-stricken, and without her best friend to guide her, Amelia questions everything she had planned for the future.
When a mysterious, rare edition of the Orman Chronicles arrives, Amelia is convinced that it somehow came from Jenna. Tracking the book to an obscure but enchanting bookstore in Michigan, Amelia is shocked to find herself face-to-face with the enigmatic and handsome N. E. Endsley himself, the reason for Amelia’s and Jenna’s fight and perhaps the clue to what Jenna wanted to tell her all along.
Okay, so… This was a romance? Am I asking… Yes… And not in a bad way. It’s just… To call this a romance when it was so much more than that.
Again, if you’ve been reading my reviews recently, you know I’ve been having a love/hate with YA. It’s either right on the mark or too young. And when I complain about how young it is, it’s always with the understanding that that’s my issue. It is YA, after all.
So when I decided to read Amelia Unabridged, I went into it with the same hesitancy that I have been for a while. Knowing that it was a roll of the dice.
It took about three pages for me to realize that with this one I was going to be in for a ride.
The plot. A newly-graduated Amelia and Jenna–best friends/chosen sisters–have a last to-do at a book conference, hoping to meet N.E. Endsley, author of the Orman Chronicles. The Orman Chronicles, in many ways, helped Amelia with loneliness and helped bond the girls over the shared love of the series.
So when the meeting doesn’t go as planned, Amelia and Jenna have their very first fight. They manage to make-up–barely–before Jenna goes on a trip–and is killed in an accident.
And then she receives a package that leads her to a bookshop in Michigan.
The feelings of this story were a bit too much for me sometimes. The sadness just rolling off Amelia is difficult to read sometimes. Her grief, staggering.
And when she meets new characters at this bookshop, the story gets even deeper.
N.E. Endsley has his own story. His own heartache. And while difficult to navigate, Amelia and N.E. are bonded in that sadness.
I absolutely adore this story. I loved so much of the way Schumacher expressed the characters’ feelings. And some of the poetry in her writing was beautiful.
“I have the strangest thought that, if I wanted to, I could bring this whole bookstore crumbling to the ground by touching my index finger to the boarded wall of this room and releasing all the energy stored in my body.”
And some of Amelia’s thoughts on relationships really nailed it for me,
“It seems unfair that the world is often critical of finding meaning in another person. We’re allowed to find ourselves in places, books, music, nature, but not in another human. We aren’t allowed to mourn losing a piece of ourselves for too long–especially when young–because we must learn to stand on our own two feet.
But if the world must be made of car crashes and unspeaking books, let there at least be no guilt in companionship, no matter how brief.”
This book is a must-read. There’s romance, even in the midst of heartache. There’s found family. There’s so much beauty in all the sadness.
About Ashley Schumacher
Ashley Schumacher is the author of Amelia Unabridged and Full Flight and has a degree in creative writing from the University of North Texas. When she’s not reading or writing, she’s either singing Disney songs, finding new and exciting ways to pester her family, or trying to find her inside voice, which has been sadly missing since birth. She lives in a small town north of Dallas with her husband, son, and more books than is strictly necessary.
