Wendy Ogilvie My Year in Books – Gone Girl
As a writer, I couldn’t help but read the hype from the literary world about this New York Times best selling novel from Gillian Flynn.
Gone Girl is one of the best—and most frightening—portraits of psychopathy I’ve ever read. Nick and Amy manipulate each other—with savage, merciless and often darkly witty dexterity. This is a wonderful and terrifying book about how the happy surface normality and the underlying darkness can become too closely interwoven to separate.
Tana French, New York Times bestselling author of Faithful Place and Into the Woods
The story is told by two unreliable narrators, Nick and Amy Dunne. Amy goes missing on the day of their fifth anniversary and the evidence shows she is probably dead.As the story unfolds and further evidence is revealed, Nick becomes the main suspect.
My friend had raved to me about how excellent this book was so I downloaded it to my Kindle, tucked myself into bed and began to read.
Half way through the book I found myself skimming to get to a good bit. This wasn’t what I had been expecting. I felt no connection, sympathy or empathy for the main characters therefore I didn’t care what happened to either of them.
I was reassured, by the same friend, that it would improve and I couldn’t deny the excellent prose of Gillian Flynn. If nothing else, I would learn how to be a better writer from this author.
Did it get better in the second half? Yes it did! The story took on a different form: in the first half of the book the constant change in point of view from Nick to Amy jarred the story flow for me, but it came together in the second half. I rather enjoyed their twisted relationship.
In conclusion, this book did not grip me as much as I had hoped but there is no doubt about the writing talent of Gillian Flynn. Would I choose to read another book by this author? Yes I would.
What did you think?
Wendy Ogilvie 
I really liked Gone Girl. As you said, the prose is undeniably gorgeous. Flynn is obviously a great writer. I liked the main characters, specifically because I thought it was fun how they were both liars and you had to try and figure out for yourself what was happening. What I will say is, while the story was great, the “twists” were not too difficult to see coming. I enjoyed the ride, but I always had a pretty good idea where the roller coaster was heading.
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It just goes to show you can’t please all the people all of the time 🙂 Just as well or we would all be writing the same stuff. I have just got a manuscript back from being critiqued so let’s hope I can produce a story that at least some people like!
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I’m sure you can. I honestly believe that there is a readership out there for every single book – some are just more difficult to find than others.
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