Gone Girl (by Gillian Flynn)
Entertainment Weekly's incessant raves for this book, along with my friend Sony's endorsement that this was a good airplane read, finally wore me down. I got this on my Kindle for reading on vacation, and I spent a day when the power was out basically just reading it.
The plot: Nick's wife Amy disappears. Did he kill her? When we read Amy's diary, do we learn Important Things? Told in alternating Nick/Amy point of view, and the various plot strands and points of view do a nice job intersecting.
The good: a page-turner! Is nicely ambiguous. Features a pair of possibly unreliable narrators. Was hard to put down. The voices of Nick and Amy are well delineated and you can tell them apart for sure. Well written, definitely.
The less good: The ending. I will hide this to be super safe with spoilers, because you should avoid them and then just go read it. { It isn't that it's ambiguous, because I like ambiguity, it just seems to peter out somewhat and the final resolution seems super, super implausible. }
I will say if you like literary crime stuff along the lines of The Lovely Bones or suspense stuff like the non-boring middle part of Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, you will probably like this book. So read it and then tell me what you think of the ending.
The plot: Nick's wife Amy disappears. Did he kill her? When we read Amy's diary, do we learn Important Things? Told in alternating Nick/Amy point of view, and the various plot strands and points of view do a nice job intersecting.
The good: a page-turner! Is nicely ambiguous. Features a pair of possibly unreliable narrators. Was hard to put down. The voices of Nick and Amy are well delineated and you can tell them apart for sure. Well written, definitely.
The less good: The ending. I will hide this to be super safe with spoilers, because you should avoid them and then just go read it. { It isn't that it's ambiguous, because I like ambiguity, it just seems to peter out somewhat and the final resolution seems super, super implausible. }
I will say if you like literary crime stuff along the lines of The Lovely Bones or suspense stuff like the non-boring middle part of Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, you will probably like this book. So read it and then tell me what you think of the ending.
posted by mo pie at 3:52 PM
2 Comments:
Hard to comment without any spoiling, so read at your peril, folks who've not read the book yet!!
My non-academic review of this book on Goodreads: "This one gets maybe a three and a half from me for being really engrossing, but also horrifying with language choices that felt gimmicky at times. I couldn't stop reading it, but it also majorly creeped me out." I hated the ending, but also have to tip my hat, in a way, in that it forces you to project the horror of the novel forward into a second generation. It was a final shock, when you felt like you could no longer be shocked by the book.
Spoilers in my response as well!
I am curious to know what language choices you found gimmicky! I could totally see that, as it seems gimmicky in general. I definitely agree that the finale was a final shock, but it didn't feel like a natural end to the story, somehow. Like, just the actual developments seemed totally crazy. Everything from Desi onward.
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