Amazing! It truly shows the author's growth in this genre.

Dark, disturbing, disgusting, depressing, degrading, dysfunctional, delusional, etc...

Check trigger warnings and use discretion :)

This was a strange and uncomfortable read in the best way.

The book is set as letters or journal entries from a mother to her daughter that outline her descent into madness. Is her breakdown from grief or is she truly evil, it's unclear. But this woman is unwell and has done terrible things.
As her delusions become more terrible, readers get peeks at the true horrors that have taken place in her home as the letters go on.

The author provides us with a comprehensive list of trigger warnings and for good reason. This book is not for the faint of heart. It is obvious this story is a labour of love and my heart goes out to the author for her courage to write it, as they disclose it comes from a place of lived experience. I feel honoured to have had an opportunity to grieve with the author through this book despite the palpable anxiety the horror of it gave me.

Amelia does a fabulous job at making you uneasy.

It's written as a series of letters from a mother, Madeline Auger, to her daughter, Amelia, and as the story progresses you see  911 transcripts and incident reports. I absolutely loved that it's written in this way because it's a great way of showing how unreliable Madeline is and you get to see how quickly she spirals. I also loved how the story doesn't necessarily reveal everything so you have to read between the lines and draw your own conclusions to what's going on.

Amelia is a short book that I easily read in one sitting since it was so well-written and atmospheric. It's very dark, gory, and it's got detailed descriptions of bugs (which made me squeamish). Also, huge props to the author for including trigger warnings!

Amelia comes out in May, and I highly recommend checking this one out! Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the gifted copy!

A.W. Rene has done it again. And you might be asking, “Bucky! What has she done?!”

Freaked me the fuck out. That’s what.

I don’t mean this negatively, either. Rene has a tendency to get under my skin with her writing, and while I loved A Tainted Soul and all of its gore-filled glory, this book, Amelia… well, it reminded me that there is something to fear about humanity.

The contents of this book are not for everyone, and they were hardly for me – I struggled to get through this and not because the writing was bad. I love that this was told through letters and important police documentation, and I especially love the stream of consciousness layered into this. The way that Rene strays from traditional formatting and grammatical rules to showcase the mental decline we bear witness to is reminiscent of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves on occasion, and I’m nothing if not a fucking sucker for breaking rules.

Anyway, back to the contents (my little ADHD brain needed to go on that side quest): I am begging you to read the content warnings before you pick this novella up, and don’t take them with a grain of salt! The author herself states that this was draining for her to write, and y’all should LISTEN! If there is ever a book that you actually heed the warnings of, PLEASE let it be this one.

Overall, I’m giving this a solid 4 stars for both StoryGraph and Goodreads. I can’t wait to keep reading books from the mind of A.W. Rene, and I hope you all love them as much as I do.

Thank you to the team at BDA Publishing (..heh) for this ARC. On to the next.

Thank you to NetGalley, AW Rene, and BDA publishing for the opportunity to read and review this as an ARC.

If you like: Unreliable reader, grotesque descriptive imagery, and chaotic prose, then this may be exactly what you’re looking for!
It wasn’t necessarily my cup of tea, but I do find the delivery of it to be incredibly unique and I’ll be checking out what else the author has written.

Written in a very unique way through letters from the mother to her daughter, Amelia. I enjoyed how the letters flowed through the book, and we, as the readers, saw the descent into madness, though after finishing, you wonder how far along it already was. There was no big reveal of anything per se, but it was a fun, short read!

Mind Fucking Blown!!!!

This is a dark one. It's fascinating, disgusting, frustrating, shocking, fear inducing, and just insanely well written and captivating. I couldn't put this down.

I love the format of the letters written from a mother to her daughter. It's clear to readers she suffers from mental illness. The letters leave you guessing as to what is real and what are hallucinations. The very descriptive imagery of bugs and scent created a clear image in my head of a house of horrors. The incorporation of 911 Calls and Police Reports brought it all together and answered all unknowns.

READ EVERY SINGLE CONTENT WARNING BEFORE READING THIS!

This is not for the faint of heart. Especially those who can't read about the unaliving, sa, or shaming of children and/or dogs.

This book is written almost exclusively in letters from a mother to her daughter. And while it's my first time reading a story like this, i had the best time with it.

The writing in Amelia is so descriptive and terrifyingly beautiful. At several parts of this book i was torn between "i need to read more of this author" and "i don't ever want to read anything like this again". Because WOW was it a depressing and heartbreaking story.
Our unreliable narrator just didn't give me enough information because she was so perfectly delusional and psychotic.
I didn't want this to end. I wanted this to be a 600 pages novel. I needed to know more about this woman and her family.

Please check the trigger warnings for this.

Thanks to Netgalley and BDA Publishing for the arc. I had the best and the worst time reading this.

4.5 stars 🌟

Thank you NetGalley for this arc!!! As a weirdo freak i love a weird nasty book (respectfully). I really enjoyed the format of this book in the way it’s mainly letters from the mother. You can see her loose it more and more as the book progresses and i really enjoyed that. I love an unhinged character and this did it for me. A lot of bugs and nasty in case that’s something you don’t care for but i liked it.

I received an ARC of this book via Netgalley. I am providing my honest review.

The basics:
Told through letters from a mother to a daughter over a six month period, Amelia explores violence, psychosis, and delusion through a maternal lens.

My thoughts:
This novel has a very unique premise, and I really enjoyed experiencing the plot through the eyes of the antagonist. I thought the author did a great job of inserting readers into the thoughts and feelings of Madeline Auger, while revealing tidbits of the truth through police transcripts. I believe this novel is the type of story that readers will sit with long after they’ve closed the last page. There is a lot of symbolism and metaphors to unpack, and I truly think I could read this novel four or five times before I can interpret everything that’s happening.

However, I do have a few criticisms. For me, the pacing was very slow. Despite being only 123 pages long, I felt the story and plot lagged often. I found myself getting bored far more than I would have liked. In addition, this didn’t feel like a full-fledged story to me. While we’re watching Madeline descend into madness for 110 pages, no actual action happens until the last ten pages of the novel. I found it very hard to care about anything Madeline was saying when it was just a delusional interpretation of her activities that day. In addition, there are some consistency issues. At one point, Madeline Auger is referred to as 21 years old (which is impossible, unless she had Amelia at the age of 12). Amelia is frequently referenced as being tainted for “being with some boy,” but there is no 7 - 10 year old child referenced in the novel at all. Additionally, the role of Amelia’s father is very unclear. The police reports suggest he is deceased, but Madeline refers to him being alive multiple times.

Overall, there were some great aspects of this novel. However, largely due to the pacing and lack of action, I would not recommend it to others.

Thank you to NetGalley and BDA publishing for the advanced copy of this novella. It was an honor to be among the first to enter this chaos.

It was obscene, and gruesome, and dank, and I LOVED it.

I have been reading a lot of dark subject matter the past month and as always I find it most difficult to review. It's difficult to separate the material from the overall writing and narrative. The material...it's yucky. Looking at the trigger warnings for this one is a must (the mouth gore...help).

Aside from the troublesome subject matter, I think this was well written. I enjoyed the uniqueness of the story being told through letters with interspersed police reports. The chaotic nature of the letters - especially the interweaving of past and future tenses, the unhinged rambling, and repetitiveness - drew me in and kept me wondering what happened to Amelia and what was going on in that house.

I also really liked the personification of the house and the slight religious leanings. I wish the author would've leaned more on the religious justifications used in the novella.

Overall this was an interesting and gripping horror novella well-suited to and best served in one intense chaotic burst.

i have mixed feelings about this piece. the epistolary style of this novel was intriguing, and i really enjoyed the inclusion of 911 transcripts and police reports as supplemental plot info, but i am wondering if this piece was actually well written or just shocking. the imagery was brutal, grotesque, and abrasive, but repetitive in nature. narratives centered on child abuse, i feel, need to be really well done to not come across as trauma porn. i liked the stream of consciousness style but there were a lot of moments where i thought "this is gratuitous and doesn't serve a purpose."

Thank you to NetGalley and BDA Publishing for an advanced copy of this novella.

I think I can honestly say that this was the most disturbing horror novella I've ever read. I wasn't even sure how to rate this, because honestly it was so well done and unique, but because of the subject matter I feel wrong saying that this was a 5 star read for me (which it is, I can't imagine how it was actually writing this as the author).

This novella was written as letters from a mother to her daughter. The mother is clearly unhinged, and it shows through her writing style (sometimes it sounds like a normal letter, but on other days it's a stream of consciousness/thoughts). Over the course of several months, you can start to see the picture of what happened, and it just gets more and more horrifying. There were also 911 transcripts and police reports included, which I think were an interesting touch and added to how horrific this situation was.

This was one of the more unique formats I've read, and honestly one of the most messed up/dark/depressing stories I've read. In the acknowledgements (and in the forward of the novella), the author and friend of the author allude to potential traumas the author had experienced and have worked though, and I hope this was a cathartic release for A.W. Rene.