Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

  Please welcome Andrew to our bookblog! We're looking forward to having more reviews from him.

Reviewed by Andrew 

Recently, I read the book Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn. This book is about a husband and wife who begin to see different, darker sides of each other through the first several years of their marriage. You are slowly introduced to these characters, learning how they were each raised in different ways and eventually how they meet each other and fall for one another. As you learn about the couple’s past through the wife’s diary, you are thrown into the present where, from the husband’s point of view, the wife has gone missing on their fifth anniversary.  It looks very suspicious and all signs point to the husband as the culprit.

The book’s chapters flip back and forth between the wife’s diary entries, and the husband’s personal narration, with each narrator not giving an entirely full or accurate portrayal of the story.  Instead, each twists the narrative to make the reader support their side of the story.

I greatly enjoyed the back-and-forth of this book, with the author’s writing depicting each of the main characters’ two drastically different points of view. It was difficult to “like” either of the main characters, as they each exhibit horrible qualities in their own different ways. This book has a way of keeping you in suspense, with the wife’s diary dropping subtle hints about how she is afraid of her husband, followed by chapters of the husband’s side of the story as the police begin to question him in his wife’s disappearance.

The one thing I could say about this book that I did not like was the paranoia of wondering how well you really know the people closest to you in your life (which could be said is the entire point of this novel!). The book has a way of its grittiness and doubt seeping its way into your life, the author is so good about conveying the characters’ emotions, it almost makes you feel them yourself. As a recently married man myself, this book was especially terrifying to me. Be sure to have a whimsical happy book to read lined up after this one!

Overall, this suspenseful crime thriller will keep you re-evaluating these main characters well into the story. It is interesting to follow through the couples’ past, learning about how they get to the present of the story, and then following through the investigation of the wife that has gone missing, and wondering whose story to believe. For those of you who enjoy movie adaptations of good books, there is an incredible 2014 movie version of this novel directed by David Fincher (Fight Club, The Social Network, and Se7en), starring Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike in the lead roles, and an amazing soundtrack by Nine Inch Nails front man, Trent Reznor.