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A review by theanitaalvarez
Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
3.0
What a couple of unlikable characters! As I read this book, I couldn’t avoid trying to get into someone’s side, but I gave up half-way through the book. Both Amy and Nick were awful people and I just wanted both of them to get what they had coming. Mind you, this book kept me hooked for hours. I read most of it while travelling back to Santiago after my holidays, and I stayed until four a.m. reading on the bus. That’s usually my definition for a highly entertaining book, something that keeps you going because you need to get to the next chapter.
I think that part of what kept me hooked was the way in which Flynn develops her story. At every chapter she revealed a little more about these character. While at first both Nick and Amy appeared to be somewhat likable, and the perfect couple to top it all, as the novel progresses you get to see how much their life is everything but perfect.
This is one of the themes that recur throughout the book, how appearances can deceive everyone. Everybody thinks that Nick and Amy are happy together until she disappears, and all the clues point to her husband. That’s the point when the people they know think “so, maybe everything wasn’t so perfect). And Nick’s narration points at that: he wasn’t happy, he felt trapped in his marriage and in his job. The perfect world they liked to portray didn’t really exist.
Maybe they both deserved it, though. As I said before, both narrators are pretty nasty and it was really hard to feel any sympathy for either of them. Nick cheated on his wife (which is always a shitty thing to do) and to top it, did so with one of his students. Big NO-NO there.
But, as awful as Nick was, he was still regular nasty. Amy, on the other hand, was batshit crazy and incredibly creepy. She even made Nick seem like a good guy, despite the cheating and his overall attitude to everyone. And she doesn’t only play with the characters in her world, she does the same with the reader. You spend the first part of the story feeling sorry for Diary!Amy, until you get to the part she reveals that diary was fake. And that’s just the beginning of seeing the psychopath in her. I mean, she manipulated everyone, clearly had problems relating to others and used to displace guilt about the things that went wrong. She blamed everyone for her problems: her parents, her husband, her friends. Seriously, she was a full-blown psychopath and that was very realistically shown in the story. I would be really scared of her in real life. I mean… she dedicated a year to plot vengeance against her husband.
Getting a divorce would’ve been so much easier and nicer for everyone.
But, then again, Amy is incredibly selfish and love to punish people who has offended her in everya way. She managed to make everyone think a friend of hers was crazy and obsessed about her (and later gave said friend a list of the things she’d done to deserve it: very petty stuff), and accused a guy she dated of rape. There was nothing she wasn’t willing to do, except dying. Because then she wouldn’t be there to enjoy her husband’s suffering.
I was seriously creeped by everything she did. And felt really sorry for poor Desi, who only wanted to her. But she was willing to kill in order to escape his “protection”. As said, crazy as fuck.
The ending left me somewhat unsatisfied. I felt that the conflicts weren’t resolved. Amy got the life she wanted, and Nick was trapped with her, but managed to pierce her armor saying he pitied her, but I agreed with Go (Nick’s sister) telling that their relation is crazy.
If you know that your partner is a killer, you get the hell out of dodge as soon as you can, YOU DON’T HANG AROUND!
Still, an entertaining book and a fun read.
I think that part of what kept me hooked was the way in which Flynn develops her story. At every chapter she revealed a little more about these character. While at first both Nick and Amy appeared to be somewhat likable, and the perfect couple to top it all, as the novel progresses you get to see how much their life is everything but perfect.
This is one of the themes that recur throughout the book, how appearances can deceive everyone. Everybody thinks that Nick and Amy are happy together until she disappears, and all the clues point to her husband. That’s the point when the people they know think “so, maybe everything wasn’t so perfect). And Nick’s narration points at that: he wasn’t happy, he felt trapped in his marriage and in his job. The perfect world they liked to portray didn’t really exist.
Maybe they both deserved it, though. As I said before, both narrators are pretty nasty and it was really hard to feel any sympathy for either of them. Nick cheated on his wife (which is always a shitty thing to do) and to top it, did so with one of his students. Big NO-NO there.
But, as awful as Nick was, he was still regular nasty. Amy, on the other hand, was batshit crazy and incredibly creepy. She even made Nick seem like a good guy, despite the cheating and his overall attitude to everyone. And she doesn’t only play with the characters in her world, she does the same with the reader. You spend the first part of the story feeling sorry for Diary!Amy, until you get to the part she reveals that diary was fake. And that’s just the beginning of seeing the psychopath in her. I mean, she manipulated everyone, clearly had problems relating to others and used to displace guilt about the things that went wrong. She blamed everyone for her problems: her parents, her husband, her friends. Seriously, she was a full-blown psychopath and that was very realistically shown in the story. I would be really scared of her in real life. I mean… she dedicated a year to plot vengeance against her husband.
Getting a divorce would’ve been so much easier and nicer for everyone.
But, then again, Amy is incredibly selfish and love to punish people who has offended her in everya way. She managed to make everyone think a friend of hers was crazy and obsessed about her (and later gave said friend a list of the things she’d done to deserve it: very petty stuff), and accused a guy she dated of rape. There was nothing she wasn’t willing to do, except dying. Because then she wouldn’t be there to enjoy her husband’s suffering.
I was seriously creeped by everything she did. And felt really sorry for poor Desi, who only wanted to her. But she was willing to kill in order to escape his “protection”. As said, crazy as fuck.
The ending left me somewhat unsatisfied. I felt that the conflicts weren’t resolved. Amy got the life she wanted, and Nick was trapped with her, but managed to pierce her armor saying he pitied her, but I agreed with Go (Nick’s sister) telling that their relation is crazy.
If you know that your partner is a killer, you get the hell out of dodge as soon as you can, YOU DON’T HANG AROUND!
Still, an entertaining book and a fun read.