Dreaming of Amelia / The Ghosts of Ashbury High
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Dreaming of Amelia (or The Ghosts of Ashbury High, in the US and Canada) is the story of Amelia and Riley. They're bad kids from the bad crowd at bad Brookfield High, and they've just transferred to Ashbury. Brilliant, mysterious and probably evil, they have the rich kids at Ashbury spellbound. But just who are Amelia and Riley? Tantalisingly aloof, they are somehow managing to have an extraordinary impact on all the HSC Ashbury students, and the staff. Told through memoirs written as part of the gothic fiction elective in the HSC English exam, Dreaming of Amelia is a story about ghosts, secrets, madness, passion, locked doors, femme fatales – and that terrifying moment in the final year of high school when you realise that the future's come to get you. |
* New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards, Shortlisted Book
* Prime Minister's Literary Awards, Highly Commended
What Others said about Dreaming of Amelia/ Ghosts of Ashbury High
"A book that makes you want to read until one in the morning, gasp in delight at the new plot development, and carry on reading. A book of sheer brilliance."
- Teen Titles Book Review Magazine
"An irresistible novel about bad kids ... this will keep you more than entertained."
- The Sunday Age
"Dreaming of Amelia has everything you would expect from a Jaclyn Moriarty novel - humour, contemporary observation and it's engagingly written through a series of emails, essays, school reports and blogs. This is an entirely unpredictable modern-day ghost story that will send shivers down any teen reader's spine."
- Books Quarterly
"This novel is an absolute gem - the sort of book you really can't put down.... anyone who has lived through the HSC recently - as a student or parent - will appreciate how brilliantly this book captures that final year of school with all its fear, angst and hope."
- Family Circle magazine
"Moriarty knows her ch∫aracters intimately. She knows how to hold the reader's attention and keep them guessing to the end with her clever, sharp prose and subtle innuendo."
- Good Reading magazine (5 stars)
"This very clever and bewitching novel mostly takes place during an HSC English exam on gothic fiction. ... There is a beautiful weaving of a story of a young Irish convict, the uncovering of a frightening past and a storm-lashed ending that will test each one of these students as they face the final moments of their school lives."
- Deborah Abela, ABC Radio Canberra
"Poetic and original."
- Magpies magazine
"Just the right balance of spooky and hilariously funny."
- Steph Bowe on Hey, teenager of the year blog
"Dreaming of Amelia, by Jaclyn Moriarty, was a wondrous strange, gorgeous, funny, bizarre mind trip of a novel that had me totally captivated, ensnared, drunk on its beauty and wildness, for two whole days. When I wasn't reading it (i.e., when I was meant to be working), I was thinking about it; mulling it over; wishing I was still reading it; wanting to find out what happened next. ... It made my brain glow. It was fabulous."
- Miss Cackle's Booky Nook Blog (cacklesbluemoonyear.blogspot.com)
"The students delight, to varying degrees, in playing with the tropes of gothic literature, lending the story an often wicked sense of humour, creating modern and effective ghost stories in the process... Fans of the previous books will enjoy clever references to past events, but this book more than stands on its own, as the students' chorus creates a compelling collective portrait of adolescence - the limbo between childhood and the shadowed future."
- Publisher's Weekly, starred review