On a warm summer morning in North Carthage, Missouri, it is Nick and Amy Dunne’s fifth wedding anniversary. Presents are being wrapped and reservations are being made when Nick’s clever and beautiful wife disappears. Husband-of-the-Year Nick isn’t doing himself any favors with cringe-worthy daydreams about the slope and shape of his wife’s head, but passages from Amy’s diary reveal the alpha-girl perfectionist could have put anyone dangerously on edge. Under mounting pressure from the police and the media—as well as Amy’s fiercely doting parents—the town golden boy parades an endless series of lies, deceits, and inappropriate behavior. Nick is oddly evasive, and he’s definitely bitter—but is he really a killer? 

Source: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/196906/gone-girl-by-gillian-flynn/

Gone Girl

Gillian Flynn

For use in schools and libraries only. When a woman goes missing on her fifth wedding anniversary, her diary reveals hidden turmoil in her marriage, while her husband, desperate to clear himself of suspicion, realizes that something more disturbing than murder may have occurred.

Tampon commercial, detergent commercial, maxipad commercial, Windex commercial. You’d think all women do is clean and bleed.

There's something disturbing about recalling a warm memory and feeling utterly cold.

Steffi'sBookShelve

Love is the world’s infinite mutability; Lies, hatred, murder even, are all knit up in it; it is the inevitable blossoming of its opposites, a magnificent, rose smelling faintly of blood.

This is heartbreaking. A spouse unable to picture you as anything but the worst version of yourself no matter how much effort you put in to counter this.

Paige

Sometimes I feel like Nick has decided on a version of me that doesn't exist. Since we've moved here, I've done girls' nights out and charity walks, I've cooked casseroles for his dad and helped sell tickets for raffles. I tapped the last of my money to give to Nick and Go so they could buy the bar they've always wanted, and I even put the check inside a card shaped like a mug of beer — 

— and Nick just gave a flat begrudging thanks. I don't know what to do. I'm trying.

It’s a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless Automat of characters.

Jaden

Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl.

Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they’re fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl.

High Fidelity

We’ve never had a conversation about my paranoia, because we’re pretending to be in love and I’m pretending not to be frightened of her.

She is reading The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury. A sci-fi girl. Abused women like escapism, of course.

 Can you imagine, finally showing your true self to your spouse, your soul mate, and having him not like you?

I know this sounds the stuff of moony teenage girls, but I’ve been tracking Nick’s moods. Toward me. Just to make sure I’m not crazy. I’ve got a calendar, and I put hearts on any day Nick seems to love me again, and black squares when he doesn’t. The past year was all black squares, pretty much.

My husband is the most loyal man on the planet until he’s not.

I have never been a nag. I have always been rather proud of my un-nagginess. So it pisses me off, that Nick is forcing me to nag. I am willing to live with a certain amount of sloppiness, of laziness, of the lackadaisical life. I realize that I am more type A than Nick, and I try to be careful not to inflict my neat-freaky, to-do-list nature on him.

Click. You just know each other. All of a sudden you see reading in bed and waffles on Sunday and laughing at nothing and his mouth on yours. And it’s so far beyond fine that you know you can never go back to fine. That fast. You think: Oh, here is the rest of my life. It’s finally arrived.

It’s the female pissing contest – as we swan around our book clubs and our cocktail hours, there are few things women love more than being able to detail the sacrifices our men make for us. A call-and-response, the response being: ‘Ohhh, that’s so sweet.’

But there’s no app for a bourbon buzz on a warm day in a cool, dark bar. The world will always want a drink.

I suppose these questions stormcloud over every marriage: What are you thinking? How are you feeling? Who are you? What have we done to each other? What will we do?

I’ve suffered betrayal with all five senses. For over a year.

Steph Lodico

I am a little too much, and he is a little too little. I am a thornbush, bristling from the overattention of my parents, and he is a man of a million little fatherly stab wounds, and my thorns fit perfectly into them.

raia – inactive

Hell, at this point, I can’t imagine my story without Amy. She is my forever antagonist.

Can you imagine, finally showing your true self to your spouse, your soul mate, and having him not like you? So that’s how the hating first began. I’ve thought about this a lot, and that’s where it started, I think.

Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl.

But he didn’t love me, me. Nick loved a girl who doesn’t exist. I was pretending, the way I often did, pretending to have a personality. I can’t help it, it’s what I’ve always done: The way some women change fashion regularly, I change personalities. 

Allegrachatterjee

 This book was such a mind fuck. I liked it kind of felt “The Perfect Marriage” vibes but different in its own way.

Edna Aviles

this book is iconic and i cant believe i’ve never read it! i truly feel so happy to be a woman

soph 

It was well written and definitely kept me on the edge of my seat, but… it made me so mad. Twisted. Spineless. Sick. I don’t feel sorry for a single character in the book, save the lady detective. It’s pretty bad when the cop is the best person in the book. 

Jennifer Palmer

A love like this just doesn’t come around probably ever 

Zachary Roberts

A Novel

These two are cuckoo crazy and they deserve eachother. May a marriage like this never find anyone. 

Jillian Roberts

Great, thrilling read with believable characters and the author has a way of writing where you can visualize everything as it’s happening…but the ending let me down.

Danielle Naurayan

This book would really make you think twice about getting married. Just what the heck was that? I feel like this could be a 200-page kind of book—it should've been. Nick Dunne and Amy Elliot-Dune. What a terrible way to live life.

Kath

In the beginning, it was a tough read. I kept thinking “why hell is this book so famous? Amy is the most spineless, pathetic, pick me girl”. It was hard to put up with how childish Amy was portrayed but, above all, with how much I despised Nick and how he treated her.

Needless to say, I was in for a surprise. One of the best plot twists I have read, and though I called it from the beginning “well, obviously she staged it”, the way it was developed was absolutely brilliant. Watching the characters become increasingly more psychotic, yet still rooting for them, for the shit-show to become an even bigger shit-show, was thrilling and kept me hooked until the last page. 

I have to admit that I despise Nick. He was a complete asshole and, even after being framed and having his whole life ruined, I couldn’t help but feel avenged for Amy. But maybe that is just my own psycho bitch side. 

The ending wrapped everything together in a way that keeps you wanting more (because the story is just so good that you want to keep reading and watch the characters become even more deranged) but brings closure. It is hard to end an intense story like that, and I believe Flynn executed it flawlessly. 

Brunella

In the beginning, it was a tough read. I kept thinking “why hell is this book so famous? Amy is the most spineless, pathetic, pick me girl”. It was hard to put up with how childish Amy was portrayed but, above all, with how much I despised Nick and how he treated her.

Needless to say, I was in for a surprise. One of the best plot twists I have read, and though I called it from the beginning “well, obviously she staged it”, the way it was developed was absolutely brilliant. Watching the characters become increasingly more psychotic, yet still rooting for them, for the shit-show to become an even bigger shit-show, was thrilling and kept me hooked until the last page. 

I have to admit that I despise Nick. He was a complete asshole and, even after being framed and having his whole life ruined, I couldn’t help but feel avenged for Amy. But maybe that is just my own psycho bitch side. 

The ending wrapped everything together in a way that keeps you wanting more (because the story is just so good that you want to keep reading and watch the characters become even more deranged) but brings closure. It is hard to end an intense story like that, and I believe Flynn executed it flawlessly. 

En un caluroso día de verano, Amy y Nick se disponen a celebrar su quinto aniversario de bodas en North Carthage, a orillas del río Mississippi. Pero Amy desaparece esa misma mañana sin dejar rastro. A medida que la investigación policial avanza las sospechas recaen sobre Nick. Sin embargo, Nick insiste en su inocencia. Es cierto que se muestra extrañamente evasivo y frío, pero ¿es un asesino? La adaptación de la novela ha sido llevada al cine en la película dirigida por David Fincher con Ben Affleck y Rosamund Pike como protagonistas principales.

Gone girl

What a book! I absolutely loved reading Gone Girl, I didn't expect any of the plot twists and it's definitely one I'd read again.

0cchi

Mia Hamilton

Lola

It was boring. 🤷‍♀️ could have definitely been 200 pages shorter.

Amy is not a sociopath. She is unstable to the core, and immature. What happened here is how Gillian Flynn writes Amy, we simply sympathizing to her delusions. 

Angelica Blanche Salva 

gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss

Amy is not a sociopath. She is unstable to the core, and immature. What happened here is how Gillian Flynn writes Amy, we simply sympathizing to her delusions. 

ellie 💐💌⭐️

Nova

3.5

amy is delusional. for someone who's incredibly smart, she's so easily deluded into believing what she wants. a really interesting character. it wasn't grappling enough that i need to keep reading it in one sitting, but it still made a pretty intense read. i really liked the dictions used. 

also, just like many people have said in their reviews: don't get married.

Lindy

When a woman goes missing on her fifth wedding anniversary, her diary reveals hidden turmoil in her marriage, while her husband, desperate to clear himself of suspicion, realizes that something more disturbing than murder may have occurred.

Bella Baxter

Y'know, it's been a VERY long time and I mean very (we're talking about since HP Book 6 when I was in middle school-currently two years out of college) that I've stayed up at night to read and this book just blew me away. Plot twists out of nowhere, unbelievable deception, crafty characters....I looked forward to it every night. I think I've been inducted into the thriller genre and it's all thanks to this book.

Sorin

Julia Whelan

Kirby Heyborne

Loved the ending. Although I feel sorry for Nick that he has to stay with Amy, they are both terrible people who deserve to make each other miserable for the rest of their lives. 

Emma Miller

Tobias V. Langhoff

I will review this novel in the way that one of its main characters wants me to:
‘It’s good.’ She chirps the last bit as if that were all to say about a book: It’s good or it’s bad. I liked it or I didn’t. No discussion of the writing, the themes, the nuances, the structures. Just good or bad. Like a hot dog.
All right. Gone Girl is pretty good.

The writing is fine and reminded me of Nick Hornby. I’m probably alone in this, but I felt that the first half of the book read a bit like a crime version of one of my favorite books, High Fidelity. The protagonists are also basically the same characters; a lovable and self-deprecating asshole who loses his girl and as a result re-examines his fear of commitment and tendency to act on his emotions.

To speak of the themes I must spoil the plot. I realized early on that there would be a plot twist, as everyone knows by now, but I was actually convinced that the twist that was foreshadowed was different, darker and more sinister than the actual twist. Because I don’t have any other place to share the theories I formed while reading, I’ll do it here:

(view spoiler)[Nick considered that Amy wanted to be found, and I thought the treasure hunt was a race to find her, because she had hidden herself. (That last part turned out to be true, of course.) I first believed that Nick would be too late, and find her hidden in some place significant in their relationship that he had forgotten, and that she would be lying there, dead. Reaffirming this theory was the doormat outside their house with the words “All are friends who enter here”; nobody had broken in. That theory would have worked if Amy was a friend to Nick.

After the blood was found in the kitchen, and her “pregnancy” was revealed, I thought she had possibly cut the fetus out of her womb there, and that the dead baby would be waiting in the wooden crib that was one of the clues. That would have been dark indeed.

As it stands, however, the first half of the novel simply plays with the “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” trope, and the twist deconstructs it, which brings us neatly to the structure of the book. (hide spoiler)]

Structure-wise, the book has chapters that alternate between first person point of views from the two highly unreliable narrators, both of whom clearly suffer from some mental issues, perhaps sociopathy and narcissism. The most interesting part of the book is watching the “game” between these two minds unfold.

Following the twist, however, I felt a little let down by the rest of the book. Events unfolded at a more rapid pace, less akin to the mysterious feel of the first part. A lot of character development (especially of secondary characters) was tossed aside for the quick and, to me, slightly unsatisfying and predictable ending.

I liked the book, but after finishing it I felt much as I do after having ravenously eaten a regular old hot dog on an empty stomach.

Saw the movie first. Book was just as phenomenal 

Ry J-W

Alecx Motus

Loved loved loved this book. I was on the edge of my seat the whole time and I found it so hard to put down. I missed a few bus stops on my way to work because of this book. The twist and turns were so unpredictable that I couldn't even tell if they were real. Although I have to say I was hoping for a little more for the ending. It left me hanging and needing more from Nick and Amy, and not in a cliff hanger kind of way. It felt a lot like there was no closure to the book. Regardless of how I felt about the ending, absolutely loved it!

Gone Girl

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