I’ve been wanting to read Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn for a very long time so when I finally got around to it, I was so excited.

On a summer morning in North Carthage, Missouri, it is Nick and Amy Dunne’s fifth wedding anniversary. Nick’s clever and beautiful wife disappears; 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 behaviour. Nick is oddly evasive, and he’s definitely bitter—but is he really a killer? His wife’s killer?

If you’re looking for a book that will keep you on the edge of your seat until you’ve turned the last page, then this is the book for you. Gone Girl is a crime, thriller novel that captivates the reader from the very first page.

The idea of this novel is fantastic and Gillian Flynn has a beautiful writing style but I found the characters of Nick and Amy to be quite two dimensional – whether this is a character representation of their relationship, I don’t know. Amy came across as a rich, stuck-up woman and her problems that are shown in this book are very small but Flynn paints them as the end of the world. I was also sick of reading about how brilliant Amy was and how she was so beautiful and perfect. It was boring, it was repetitive she just becomes this idiotic character three-quarter of the way through the book. Nick is pathetic, wimpy and whiny and was bordering on becoming a misogynist with his repetition of “fucking bitch” all throughout the book. He also becomes an idiot of a character three-quarters of the way throughout the book.

Due to a number of expletives and sexual description throughout the book, I would say that Gone Girl is aimed at readers aged sixteen and older. 

“We weren’t ourselves when we fell in love, and when we became ourselves – surprise! – we were poison. We complete each other in the nastiest, ugliest possible way.”

– Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

However, moving away from the characters, the story was fantastic and I loved the huge question that hung over the novel: “did Nick kill Amy?” I also quite enjoyed reading the book from both the characters perspectives. We follow Nick’s story in the present tense whilst the investigation is going underway and Amy’s perspective in diary entries from before her disappearance that describes her and Nick’s relationship. The two different points of view offer us a deeper insight into their rollercoaster relationship and make the reader almost become detectives themselves, making the readers question every character in their heads as they are reading and seeing if that particular character could have committed the crime. It’s very clever of Flynn.

I was very impressed with the twist of Gone Girl (it was a twist however, that can be easily figured out), but my mouth was still agape and still led me to finish this book as soon as possible so that I could see what the ending was like. 

The ending was disappointing. Very disappointing and a lot of readers have said this to Gillian Flynn. It was disappointing because readers know that what happens at the end wouldn’t really happen, it’s unbelievable. On the other hand, the ending shows how messed up Nick and Amy’s relationship was and how messed up their characters were.

Overall, I did thoroughly enjoy this book, I read it in a couple of days and once I had finished the book, I decided to watch the film. Even though the characters weren’t my favourite, there are bumps in every book. Gillian Flynn is a fantastic writer, she knows how to make you feel something, she knows how to shock and scare. I would recommend this book to anyone who loves a good thriller. 

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