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Loading... Gone Girl (edition 2012)by Gillian Flynn (Author)
Work InformationGone Girl by Gillian Flynn
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Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl follows the story of Amy Dunne’s disappearance, in which the primary suspect quickly becomes the husband, Nick. This book was such a thrilling page-turner, and Flynn does a nice job of alternating between Amy’s and Nick’s perspective on their marriage and characterizing narcissism and psychopathy. It’s one of those stories where you probably won’t like or side with either of the characters, but where their motivations are so fascinating to delve into. ( ) from Jordan: I'd avoided reading Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn for a few years. I love well crafted crime novels, but it had been complimented and hyped up so much to me that I felt like it couldn't live up to those expectations even if it was good. Now that the upcoming movie adaptation is imminent, I felt like it was now or never. Gone Girl focuses on married couple Nick and Amy Dunne in New York City. Nick is a pop culture journalist and a transplant from a small town in Missouri. Amy is a magazine quiz writer -- think "What type of marriage do you have?!" from a women's magazine -- who is the basis for her parents' children's book series Amazing Amy. During the 2008 financial collapse, they both lose their jobs, then Amy's parents pay the price of their poor investments and have to borrow all the money from Amy's trust fund. Nick's abusive father has Alzheimer's and has to be moved to a nursing home and his mother is diagnosed with terminal cancer so between that and their inability to afford living in NYC, they move back to Nick's childhood home in New Carthage, Missouri. On their fifth anniversary, Amy goes missing. The story follows the aftermath as the police and media begin to blame Nick for her disappearance. I can't delve too far into the rest of the plot because Gone Girl, like so many mystery/crime novels before it, rely on twists, turns, and surprises. Suffice it to say, its use of the literary device of an unreliable narrator is both well done and integral to the story. It does a fantastic job at portraying the media's axiom of "the husband did it" regardless of whether or not it's true. My only qualm with the novel is the ending, which is brief, overly ambiguous, and unbefitting of a novel whose ups and downs you've endeavored to read. This is a conventional potboiler mystery with a twist. A lot of twists. I would in fact call it twisted. I go so far as to give it three stars because it was a page-turner and leads to rumination on a question that has been bothering me for the past decade: Why was Laci Peterson's murder national news when so many other, less attractive, women go missing every day? Was her story *that* much more compelling than the hundreds of others? "Gone Girl" handily sidesteps that issue by making its antiheroine the namesake protagonist of a series of children's books, so it comes as little surprise when the story hits the (fictional) national media. One answer to the question, thus, is that a missing woman makes the national news when she is pretty, white, and has a media-savvy family. Both central characters end up incredibly unsympathetic.
Flynn writes bright, clever, cynical sentences. Maybe too many of them in Gone Girl. The same facts and ideas seem to repeat themselves. But that’s a minor gripe in a book that never slacks in tightening the suspense. The basic questions the mystery asks are these: did the journalist husband murder his well-to-do missing wife or is she setting him up to pay a creepy price? On Flynn’s slick way to reaching the answer, she pulls the rug from under us readers three times. Or was it four? This American author shook up the thriller scene in 2007 with her debut Sharp Objects, nasty and utterly memorable. Gone Girl, her third novel, is even better – an early contender for thriller of the year and an absolute must read. Is contained inHas the adaptationIs parodied inHas as a reference guide/companionHas as a commentary on the textHas as a student's study guideAwardsDistinctionsNotable Lists
On the morning of his fifth wedding anniversary, Nick's wife Amy suddenly disappears. The police immediately suspect Nick. Amy's friends reveal that she was afraid of him, that she kept secrets from him. He swears it isn't true. A police examination of his computer shows strange searches. He says they aren't his. And then there are the persistent calls on his mobile phone. So what really did happen to Nick's beautiful wife? No library descriptions found.
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.6Literature American literature in English American fiction in English 2000-LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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