Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

Winner of the 2012 Goodreads Choice Award for Best Mystery/Thriller, Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl is the tale of a marriage gone very, very wrong.

Summary

Nick and Amy Dunne are about to celebrate their fifth wedding anniversary. Expecting his annual anniversary gift scavenger hunt from his wife, Nick returns home to find his house in shambles and his wife missing. Nick’s narration of the events following Amy’s disappearance and Amy’s diary entries from the events occurring before her disappearance are woven together to tell the story of a marriage wrapped in lies. Did Nick kill his wife? When and why did this romance turn sour?

Review

Gone Girl is one of those books that will keep you up waaaaaaay past your bedtime. You know what I’m talking about — you get in bed, turn on the lamp, and think, “just a few pages before I fall asleep.” Next thing you know it’s 3am and you’re holding your eyelids open just to find out how it all ends. The alternating narration keeps the plot moving quickly, which is what makes Gone Girl so hard to put down. Nick’s character is so ambiguous (did he do it?) and the circumstances are so bizarre that it’s hard to tell where the story is going.  Flynn reveals just enough at just the right times.

Despite the delightfully wicked twists, Gone Girl does suffer from a slow start. The first quarter of the book felt very ordinary. Good, but not great. Nick was a little shady, Amy was quite charming, and it was hard to see where the story was going. It almost veered in the Lifetime movie direction. But once things picked up, they really picked up. Gillian Flynn certainly has a talent for writing and the incredible ability to play with details. I can only imagine that planning out this novel must have involved charts and diagrams to keep everything straight. Whew!

This book is worth a read because every one’s talking about it. Gone Girl is a novel destined to inspire strong opinions and intense emotions, especially regarding the jaw-dropping ending. Read it with your BFF, pitch it to your book club, lend it to your brother — you’re going to want some form of social interaction to process what you’ve just read. However, take caution* when lending it to your spouse. It’s definitely not a story that inspires matrimonial bliss.

If you are looking for a book to read in a single sitting, Gone Girl fits the criteria. With its killer twists (see what I did there?) and twisted characters, it would make an excellent beach read. Gillian Flynn has written two other books, Sharp Objects and Dark Places, that are supposed to be similar psychological thrillers. I’ll definitely be looking into reading both in the future. You’ve piqued my interest here, Gillian Flynn, and I like it.

*Lend at your own risk. I am not responsible for any marital paranoia or suspicious glances.