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chrstnareads 's review for:
And Then You Were Gone
by R.J. Jacobs
I had an... experience reading this book. I knew going into it that the narrator was going to be unreliable. It's in the premise. Emily, who has bipolar disorder, is the only witness to her boyfriend, Paolo's disappearance off a boat in the middle of a lake, but she's hardly a witness. She didn't see what happened. Was she taking her medication? Was she drunk? Was he drunk? Where could he have gone without a trace? Without any other explanations, she becomes the prime suspect in his murder. Don't worry. This is hardly a spoiler as it happens almost immediately.
But as the story starts to unfold, as she maintains that circumstances around Paolo's disappearance are nothing short of fishy, as she starts to forget to take her medication, her thoughts and behaviors start to spiral. And here is where the really interesting thing happened: she is such an unreliable narrator that I actually started to feel like I was losing my mind trying to navigate this book. I can't imagine this was anything other than intentional on the author's part.
If that's true, color me impressed. It started slowly. Little plot discrepancies that made me stop. Did I read that wrong? I thought to myself so many times. Was this discussed before? How did they know? Then came the bigger things. It was seven o'clock on one page and then suddenly on the next, it was two hours later. She was waiting for something and the length of time she had left to wait didn't change in those two hours. The fuck is going on? I thought. Then it happened on the same page, lines apart. She was 10 in a memory, and what, three sentences later, she was eight. She wasn't sleeping; she was putting off her medication. Her friend, who seemed completely rational, was suddenly engaging in her irrational behavior with her. It's making me anxious just thinking about it. (Note: this feels incredibly realistic. I've known people like this. Who would barely sleep for days, refused medication, tried to explain to me the hallucinations—only sometimes knowing something was a hallucination, the other times absolutely convinced it was the truth).
But then, that makes me wonder what else in the story was even true. I believe the general path of the story, but what along the journey was real? Who even was real? I have questions. I have a lot of questions.
This book was a ride. Once it really got going, it was fast-paced and the suspense really notched up. I didn't guess the ending at all, but I'm terrible at that. 4/5 stars. I am deeply unsettled.
But as the story starts to unfold, as she maintains that circumstances around Paolo's disappearance are nothing short of fishy, as she starts to forget to take her medication, her thoughts and behaviors start to spiral. And here is where the really interesting thing happened: she is such an unreliable narrator that I actually started to feel like I was losing my mind trying to navigate this book. I can't imagine this was anything other than intentional on the author's part.
If that's true, color me impressed. It started slowly. Little plot discrepancies that made me stop. Did I read that wrong? I thought to myself so many times. Was this discussed before? How did they know? Then came the bigger things. It was seven o'clock on one page and then suddenly on the next, it was two hours later. She was waiting for something and the length of time she had left to wait didn't change in those two hours. The fuck is going on? I thought. Then it happened on the same page, lines apart. She was 10 in a memory, and what, three sentences later, she was eight. She wasn't sleeping; she was putting off her medication. Her friend, who seemed completely rational, was suddenly engaging in her irrational behavior with her. It's making me anxious just thinking about it. (Note: this feels incredibly realistic. I've known people like this. Who would barely sleep for days, refused medication, tried to explain to me the hallucinations—only sometimes knowing something was a hallucination, the other times absolutely convinced it was the truth).
But then, that makes me wonder what else in the story was even true. I believe the general path of the story, but what along the journey was real? Who even was real? I have questions. I have a lot of questions.
This book was a ride. Once it really got going, it was fast-paced and the suspense really notched up. I didn't guess the ending at all, but I'm terrible at that. 4/5 stars. I am deeply unsettled.