I am so incredibly grateful to have read this book. Schumacher has managed to do many, many things with this book. This is set in the world we live in, right? It’s all completely relatable and familiar. But within this she’s created a book series set in a land called Orman that sounds so incredibly enticing, more than once I found myself itching to read the magical story. She created a book store that seems almost too good to be true. It’s got community and presence and is inviting and warm. The owner lives upstairs in the penthouse of the book store. A dream come true for so many book lovers, I’d imagine. The town of Lochbrook sounds idyllic. Its quaint and picturesque and I have the feeling of summer time when I’m reading. The weather is warm, but not hot. The sun isn’t beating down and scorching you, it’s gently hugging you. There are ice cream shops and lake side beaches.
I’m not sure I’ve ever wanted to dive into such a realistic book before. It’s not like reading Harry Potter where you long for a magical world you know doesn’t exist. With this there is a part of you that thinks, maybe if I find this little town I’ll actually stumble into Val’s book store and be clobbered by Wally the untamable dog.
It’s almost sad realizing that this image she’s written into existence is the only way it exists.
I did try googling Lochbrook, MI and it does not appear to be a place. I was ready to plan a road trip.
To say Schumacher has created a work of art with Amelia Unabridged almost doesn’t do this book justice.
Some may try to dismiss it, and sure, we all get something different out of the stories we read, but this book has surely touched my heart.
So many aspects of this book are firmly rooted in our reality. Local bookstores, literary fandoms, friendships, grieving, chosen family versus birth family, etc. But threaded into every page is an element of magic. No, Amelia, the main character, doesn’t do magic, doesn’t possess any magical qualities, but her story feels magical. Schumacher’s writing is utterly bewitching. The imagery and descriptions she uses feel ethereal. Think of those moments in your own life where you’ve stopped and thought, wow life is truly beautiful. It could be on a vacation, staring out a window of your home, watching your child discover something for the first time. There is a sort of awe and magic in those moments and so as you read this and picture what Amelia sees and feel what she feels, you feel magical too. You have a sense that maybe magic isn’t just for fantasy novels, but maybe magic really is present in our own lives.
Schumacher has created a voice in grief. She’s put to words, as best as possible, how it feels to lose someone who has always anchored you to earth. When you lose that tether, you can’t help but feel adrift, even in the most mundane tasks. Grief can consume your thoughts constantly or hit hard out of nowhere. Amelia is grieving, she’s trying to find a purpose again while also honoring her friend’s life and memory. Amelia is grieving with her best friend’s parents, her chosen family who’ve essentially welcomed her as another daughter. That push and pull of not wanting to disappoint someone and yet not wanting the same things is so complex and Schumacher covers even that here.
It’s also a story about love and about how you sometimes meet people and have an instant and strong connection. It feels like you’ve known them for so long, even if it’s only been a week. Some people have a mutual understanding that feels powerful and unique. To feel understood is weighty, is it not?
You see, after Amelia loses her best friend, Jenna, she’s sent a mysterious package to her local book shop. It’s an impossible edition of the first Orman book. It’s the 101st copy out of 100 and Amelia knows that she has to get to the bottom of this. That at the bottom of this is a message from her best friend and it may be the last message she has from her. She sets off to Michigan to find answers and ends up finding so much more than that.
And with out further ado, I’m here to bring you some of that magic. Below is an excerpt from Amelia Unabridged. I know you’ll be drawn in:
chapter three
I learn that books are liars when, less than a week after her departure, Jenna’s mother calls to tell me that Jenna is dead.
“Car accident,” she says. “The other driver sped through a red light.”
“How?” I ask. Stupidly, brokenly. “I don’t know,” she says.
“But she was in Ireland.”
Was. I’ve only known for a minute and Jenna is already a
was instead of an is.
Jenna’s mother barely stops to breathe; she uses her attorney voice, her no-nonsense voice, the kind she uses for client calls or when Mr. Williams doesn’t cut the Thanksgiving turkey into thin enough slices.
“Will you speak, Amelia? At her funeral, I mean?”
I say yes, but when the day comes and I’m standing in front of a congregation that moments before had been singing a hymn of celebration for Jenna and her “reunion with her creator,” I lose it. I let myself bleed onto every surface—the podium, the hideous floral arrangements, her
casket—as the stories and memories imprison my head and my voice.
If this were a photo I was trying to frame in my lens, I would stretch the shadows creeping from beneath her stupid casket as far as I could. I would stretch them until they smothered the somber faces in the pews and all that would be left unshadowed in the photo would be myself behind the podium and what’s left of Jenna. I would call it Survivor and a Half.
But my imagination can only keep me occupied for so long.
Countless pairs of eyes look at me with pity and heartbreak, and I feel the years of waiting in line for book signings, the late-night study sessions when one of us had procrastinated too long on research papers, the countless hours spent reading together. All that, and the stupid, stupid pictures tacked to her bedroom wall, work their way down from the lump in my throat to the choke hold squeezing my heart.
Eventually the pastor comes up to pat my back and lead me away from the microphone, my hiccupping sobs loud enough without the assistance of amplification.
It’s wrong, I keep thinking. Life isn’t following its script and it’s not fair . . . I’m not prepared.
While some kids waited for their letter to be delivered by owl or for their closet to one day reveal a magical land with talking animals and stone tables, I’d waited for the other shoe to drop. Because if there’s one thing I learned from books, it’s that life is fair and unfair, just and unjust. When my father left us, I thought that was the end of it, but then Jenna found me and life was dreadfully out of balance again, too right and happy.
I waited for more hard parts, the ones books say begin when you’re young but always, always end in the early teenage
years to allow for happily-ever-after. The Final Big Bad Thing would happen before high school graduation. Everything bad happens to you in high school or after you’ve turned forty and have a spouse and six kids and a few decades of hard-earned disappointment under your belt.
Books lie. Life isn’t finished with you when you are eighteen or when you think you’ve had enough.
It’s never enough. You’re never in the clear.
Jenna thought her books should be new and pure, untouched by anyone but herself. I prefer my books to have already been occupied, to have stories independent of the one carried on the page. I like to imagine my used books as little soldiers that have gone off to serve their duty elsewhere before coming into my hands. Books are something to be stepped inside of, to be occupied and lived in. Maybe that’s why I tend to loan out my books while Jenna rarely parted with hers.
But Jenna is gone now. She’s gone, and her parents have bequeathed me her library.
“She’d want you to have them,” Mr. Williams says through tears, when he and Mrs. Williams come to check on me a few days after we watch Jenna’s body get lowered into the ground. This is only the second or third time they have been inside my mother’s house, and they look out of place seated on theedge of my twin bed.
Mr. Williams is vying for me to spend the remainder of the summer with them, but something inside me balks.
“You wouldn’t . . . you wouldn’t have to sleep in Jenna’s room,” Mr. Williams says. “But we could get you all the help
you need. Counselors and therapists and college coaches, whatever you need . . . whatever you want.”
“I know,” I say, rubbing my temples to try to stop the low throbbing. “I know.”
“Mark,” Jenna’s mother says. Her tone is low, mildly chastising. “She doesn’t want to be in our house.”
She’s right. I can’t stand the thought of being smothered by the long hallways of their immaculate house, which hold almost as many pictures of me on the walls as of Jenna.
Pictures of us in mud masks and pajamas. Shots of us grinning in front of the ocean, with the tip of Mr. Williams’s pinky in the corner of the frame. The one of Jenna looking back over her shoulder and smiling her devastating smile, the one she rarely let people see, the one that made her face glow and her eyes crinkle.
That’s the photo Mrs. Williams had blown up and framed for the funeral service. During the reception at their house, Kailey Lancaster pointed to where the wrapped canvas picture sat on an easel and whispered to her boyfriend, “It doesn’t even look like her.”
It took everything in me not to “accidentally” knock her
plate of cheese cubes and fruit out of her hand.
I shove the memory from my brain and half try to give Jenna’s books back, to insist they return the six or so massive boxes to Jenna’s shelves, but her parents refuse to hear of it.
When they finally leave, I spend what feels like hours going through Jenna’s library and systematically destroying page 49 of each of her books, tearing the pages in half before sloppily taping them back together. The first roll of tape I grab from the kitchen junk drawer is double-sided. I
numbly use it for about twelve books. I don’t attempt to fix the others.
It was Jenna’s rule of reading excerpts, the page 49 thing. “Far enough to get a feel for what the author’s writing is really like without going too far and risking a huge spoiler,” she always said.
I don’t know why I rip the pages. Maybe I’m hoping she will come back and chastise me for ruining her books. Maybe I’m trying to erase her, to make the books my own so I can forget perfect Jenna and her perfect books ever existed.
Or maybe I’m just stupid with grief and don’t know what I’m doing.
Later that night, summer rain patters against the window and drowns out even my most melancholy thoughts, and I try to read the book I started before graduation. Over and over, I try. I switch to Orman, and I try again. But my eyes refuse to change the letters into sentences, the sentences into pages.
I reread the same sentence no less than five times before I give up. I close the book and lie on my back with my eyes closed.
My life has split in two. Before there was a before and a sub-sequent after, I imagined myself a talented reader. Reading, for me, has always been more like playing a video game than watching a movie, an active experience that used to leave me physically and emotionally wrought.
I could step into a page and roam the described landscape independently of the characters that inhabited it. I’ve plucked the ring from Frodo and felt its inscribed Elvish on my finger- tips. I’ve sneaked gulps of milk from the Boxcar Children’s
hidden stash beneath the waterfall, borrowed Harry’s broom while he studied with Hermione, and played with the Bennet cats while Elizabeth and her sisters were dancing at Nether- field. I’ve stepped in the forest-green prints of Orman, my footprints dwarfing Emmeline’s and barely matching up to Ainsley’s. I’ve rested my palm against the cool stone of the lighthouse fortress that first greeted them upon their arrival, and smelled the salt from the sea below.
I’ve lived in books. I’ve eaten and breathed books for so long that I took it for granted. I assumed that, if they saved me once, they would always be there to pick me up, even if Jenna wasn’t.
But Jenna is gone, and the words stay on the page in their neat, orderly rows. The pages don’t rise up to meet me like old friends, and the characters are marionettes pulled by visible strings.
If I were going to take a self-portrait, I wouldn’t focus on my crumpled body curled on the bed with its mismatched sheets and pillowcases. I would take all of Jenna’s books and wrap them so tightly with masking tape that the covers would wrinkle beneath the binding. I would take my books and rip out the last two pages of each, because this is what it feels like without Jenna here to see what comes after this—college, careers, boyfriends, whatever. None of it will matter, because in all of my imaginings, it was always the two of us, sisters by choice rather than blood.
I’d arrange the ripped pages falling on the taped books and I would call it Time Heals No Wounds. Or maybe I would focus on the crumpled edges of the removed pages and call it Amelia Abridged.
When I eventually fall asleep, tears still pooling in my ears, a shadow monster with teeth chases me through endless swampy marshes. In my hand is an instruction manual on how to defeat it, but since I can no longer read, I run and run and run.
I don’t want to break the spell this chapter excerpt has surely put you under but I must. If only to assure you Amelia Unabridged is available to purchase and encourage you to rush to wherever you get your books to get it.
Happy Reading!
-Angela
@book.addicts.anonymous (Instagram)
https://www.goodreads.com/aaangelaaa (goodreads)
Librarian Wannabe 