Book Review: Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

Title: Gone Girl
Author: Gillian Flynn
Enjoyment Rating: ****
Source: Kindle for iPad
Books I've read this year: 80

I think the highest praise I can give this book is that once I started reading it, I could hardly put it down. We had company here, and every afternoon I put Rosie down for a nap and promptly sneaked off to my bedroom to read for an hour or so. When I finished it, I told Eddie he HAD to read it, and he spent the next weekend our company was here holed up in the bedroom reading. I've already bought Flynn's first book (she wrote two other suspense/thrillers before Gone Girl).

Before you get too excited, and before I figure out a way to talk about the story without giving any spoilers, let me say that if you're at all squeamish about murder, sex, violence, foul language, or just plain evil, this might not be the book for you. I'd say that Flynn definitely leans toward the gratuitous when it comes to the vices. In fact, at one point in the novel, one of the characters proclaims the protagonists to be the two most screwed up people he's ever met.

Gone Girl opens with Amy Dunne disappearing on her fifth wedding anniversary. Her husband, Nick, becomes the immediate suspect. Over the next 432 pages, we hear Nick tell his side of the story, as he sees it fit to tell us (he freely admits that he omits certain details). But we also hear from Amy through her journal, a chronicle of their five-year marriage that makes it quite evident that all was not well behind the closed doors of their Carthage, Missouri home.

I can't say more. I'd love to say more, but I can't. You just have to go read it yourself and watch how Flynn unfolds her story. Just be prepared to have a messy house and unfed children while you hole up reading.