Gone Girl

Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn.

"I don't know. She's not a never-met-a-stranger kind of person, but she's not - not abrasive enough to make someone ... hurt her."

This was my eleventh lie. The Amy of today was abrasive enough to want to hurt, sometimes. I speak specifically of the Amy of today, who was only remotely like the woman I fell in love with. It had been an awful fairy-tale reverse transformation. Over just a few years, the old Amy, the girl of the big laugh and the easy ways, literally shed herself, a pile of skin and soul on the floor, and out stepped this new, brittle, bitter Amy. My wife was no longer my wife but a razor-wire knot daring me to unloop her, and I was not up to the job with my thick, numb, nervous fingers. Country fingers. Flyover fingers untrained in the intricate, delicate work of solving Amy. When I'd hold up the bloody stumps, she'd sigh and turn to her secret mental notebook on which she tallied all my deficiencies, forever noting disappointments, frailties, shortcomings. My old Amy, damn, she was fun. She was funny. She made me laugh. I'd forgotten that. And she laughed. From the bottom of her throat, from right behind that small finger-shaped hollow, which is the best place to laugh from. She released her grievances like handfuls of birdseed: They are there, and they are gone.

I stayed up until 1am last night to finish this book, and today I am tired but it was worth it. This was the book everyone was talking about this past summer, and I put my name on the hold list for it at my local library and just now was able to read it; however, it is definitely worth the wait.

The story opens on Nick and Amy's fifth anniversary. She makes him crepes, and then he heads out to the beach to relax for a bit - alone. He goes to The Bar, the bar that he and his twin sister Go (Margo) own, and gets a strange call from a neighbor: his house's door is wide open. Nick goes to check and finds his living room smashed to bits and Amy gone. The police come and investigate, and eventually they find some disturbing things: blood, mopped up, all over the kitchen floor; the struggle in the living room looks posed as well. All signs point to Nick, but Nick, even though he has a 23-year-old mistress, didn't do it; eventually, he and Go figure out something disturbing about Amy that has to do with the case, and they start investigating it themselves.

The first half of this book is told in alternating chapters, between Amy Elliott's diary (soon to be Amy Elliott Dunne after marrying Nick) and Nick's recollections from the present. After the first half, there's a VERY interesting twist, and we end up with not one but TWO unreliable narrators. Nick is an unreliable narrator because about 1/4 of the way through the book, he confesses that he has a mistress - Andi, 23 (he is 34, Amy is 38) - and says something to the effect of "I am guessing you like me less now." His wife, Amy, was the subject of the book series Amazing Amy, that her parents, who studied psychology like her, wrote when she was a little girl. We later find out that she has always held a grudge against them for this, because any decision that they thought she made poorly gets written into the book the way they would have wanted it to happen.

Amy is extremely smart, and after the first half of the book when we learn that her diary entries were "unreliable," so to speak, things really pick up, and we begin to see her in a completely different light.

I definitely recommend this book for anyone that likes mysteries, and also anyone that likes a good story in general; it has a ton of twists and turns that will keep you hooked.

4.5 stars out of 5.