Gone over Gone Girl

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I had a brief argument with myself over whether to give this four or five stars. In the end, I decided there was no need to be stingy, and I don't really have any complaints about the book, so why not five?

It's hard to summarize this book without spoilers, and this (like Room) is to me a book whose power lies in the slow unfolding of a story, the gradual realization on the part of the reader that things may not be what they at first seemed. That power diminishes if you already know the plot. Though this isn't a mystery in the usual sense of the word, it does have the tension of a crime thriller, and the same effect of making you desperate to find out What Actually Happened. The impressive thing (to me) is that the clues to What Actually Happened aren't things uncovered by police or detective work, they're more like possible slips by the narrator: I found myself analyzing the word choices constantly and going back and forth on whether I thought the husband was guilty of involvement in his wife's disappearance. In short, I really enjoyed this book, and I thought all the twists were well-executed, clever, and yet believable.