Monday, April 22, 2013

Gone Girl

Gone Girl  by Gillian Flynn
Read:  2013

On Nick and Amy Dunne's fifth wedding anniversary, Amy goes missing.  Nick is at work at the bar he owns with his sister Margo (Go), purchased by borrowing the last of Amy's trust fund money, when he receives a call from his neighbor that his cat is outside and his front door is open.  Nick rushes home to find that the iron is on and the living room looks like there was a struggle in it and Amy is nowhere to be found.

What follows is the back and forth chapters from each party's perspective. We see Nick, who we already know isn't a particularly good guy, and openly admits that he's lying about things, but you get the sense that he really is blown away by Amy being missing.  Then you have Amy's diary entries, painting a picture of a romance and happy life, followed by many disappointments in love and life.  They start with their first meeting and end on the morning she goes missing.

Amy is gone and everyone wants to find her.  Nick is the obvious suspect in her disappearance and things keep getting weirder and weirder.  Then you get that missing pretty girl effect.  Suddenly, people who didn't know her or care about her are claiming to be her best friends and she's become the treasure of a community that she despised and had no time for.  There is so much wrong with all that is going on here.  You just have to keep reading to find out what's really happening.  

This book is completely twist filled. I'm talking vertiginous.  The funny thing was that as I was reading about these people, all of these truly damaged people, I kept flipping to the back of the book, where the author's lovely cover photo is, and thinking, "she looks so nice and sweet, not at all like someone who would think this stuff up."  And, Amy is described as beautiful and having a personality that people just become obsessed with.  Hmmm, that's a little disturbing, isn't it?

If you haven't read this book, you absolutely should. It's insane.  I closed the cover after reading the last page and could only think, "holy crap!"  over and over.  This book is a 2013 Tournament of Books Book and I can't wait to see what people are saying there.

P.S.  This book did not make it to the end of The Tournament of Books.  It did make a pretty spectacular showing, though.  In the opening round it beat out Ivyland.  In the quarter finals it came up against and took out Beautiful Ruins.  In the semi-finals it lost to How Should a Person Be?  Ahh, but that wasn't the end. Gone Girl came back in the zombie round, but was sadly beaten by The Orphan Master's Son.  However, The Orphan Master's Son won the Tournament, so Gone Girl faced some serious competition.

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