Gone Girl

by Gillian Flynn
419 pgs

When Gone Girl came out a couple of years ago, a lot of people that I know wanted to talk about it. Then last year, when the movie was released, those same people wanted to talk about it all over again. Not having read it myself, I had to impose my will over the conversations each time and make sure they didn't say anything that would spoil the book for me, until I could get around to reading it myself. Well, feel free to talk away now.

I don't know that it makes a lot of sense to summarize the story, since I think most people have a general idea of what it's about. But just in case...man and woman meet and fall in love, honeymoon period ends and times get rough, woman disappears under suspicious circumstances, all believe it was the husband that killed her. The rest is what made this book so popular for so long.

This was the first of Gillian Flynn's books that I've read, but it won't be the last. I thought the story was exceptionally well thought out, and her main characters were fascinating. But what I thought was the most successful aspect of the book was her method of telling the story through an unreliable first-person narrator. That was brilliant. It was the perfect method for telling the story Flynn wanted to tell, and in the way that it needed to be told. 

★ ★ ★ ★ ☆