Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

I am apparently in the minority here but this book did absolutely nothing for me. Since so many people have given it rave reviews I was expecting a well written, thought provoking mystery and I got a fairly well written but far too wordy and pretentious book full of non-likeable and annoying as hell types of characters. When I don’t care about people is when I don’t read a book which made this especially difficult for me to get through. I only slogged through it in hopes that one or both of the protagonists would end up dead. Harsh, I know but hell even the Song of Ice and Fire series has more redeemable characters and that’s saying something.

So the setup for the story is that Nick Dunne’s wife, Amy, is missing from their home where it looks like an abduction/assault has taken place. Over the course of the first half of the book, where readers see a real time Nick chapter followed by past Amy diary chapters, the police decide that all evidence points to Nick killing his wife. Now let’s stop here for a minute. The fact that the Amy entries are supposed to be real past diary entries is crap. No one writes like that unless they want their entries to be read, aka someone who is writing their memoirs/wanting someone to read too much into them. Everything was so precise, so well detailed and grammatically correct (almost like what someone would say if they memorized an alibi they’d use with the police) that it doesn’t make any sense at all.  

By the time the second half of the book rolls around I know that what I feared to be true is true, that nobody in this story is redeemable and that I don’t want to root for anyone to win. That’s my main problem with the book. When I read something I want to like somebody. I want a person to root for. And in the real world people are not black and white, they are all shades of gray. But not in the world of Gone Girl. In Gone Girl every character except for maybe one of the officers is a horrible despicable person.

The only interesting thing I found when I read this, and it was perfectly crafted, was the realization of how incredibly sick and twisted both Nick and Amy were. Seriously both individuals are so crazy and manipulative I’m glad they found each other and didn’t screw even more people up along the way. Jeeze. Unfortunately that also meant I didn’t really care about either one of them which is where Gillian Flynn lost me especially with where the book ended (with absolutely no justice and the continuation of something toxic).