Reviews with content warning for Kidnapping - Gone Girl

None of this would've ever happened if not for the 2008 housing crisis.

Picture this. You're me. You're in biology class. it's 2014. Your teacher overhears you say you wanna be a writer or you wanna make movies when you get older. She tells you "Oh my gosh, I just saw this movie you'd really like." She softly, accidentally spoils the plot twist, but it's okay you know enough about tv amd movies to know nobody ever really dies except Uncle Ben. So you shrug it off and say, "Okay, I'll still watch it." And then she says, "It was based on a book." brcause she knows you like books. And then she goes, "Oh, wait! It's really mature... Maybe you shouldn't watch it." How old was I in 2014 you ask? FOURTEEN !!!

Honestly I was reading way worse stuff back then and I've calmed down now. But anyway.

That was, and I don't mean this lightly, pretty fucking amazing. The first third is pretty slow but it pays off so well. And then the second part being titled "Boy Meets Girl"? Even though they've known each other seven years?? Shut the fuck up it's literally true. Wow. And also, amazing.

Every crazy sociopathic calculated woman deserves her own pathetic spineless weasel of a man. Her own puppet.

And even after all that, she wasn't racist? My bar has been met. I love it.

Content Warnings

m0rdred_the_fallen's review against another edition

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adventurous dark mysterious tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

If the ever author ever makes a sequel, I sincerely hope it's about

Spoiler

their son

burn them alive and recorded their dying screams of agony for a ringtone, because both Nick and Amy deserved a painful death, but Amy primarily.

Not gonna lie,

Spoiler

Amy

had me fool for the first third of the book, I felt truly sorry for both of them I mean talk about tragic. But then the second third began and I understood that they truly deserve each other because of how they each feed the other worst side;

Spoiler

Nick is codependent child with daddy issues and Amy is a narcisist with mommy issues that still has beef with a fictional alterego and her seven unborn older sisters. Honestly, neither of them is fit to be a parent.

Go was always the voice of reason and Nick should have be fully honest from the start with her and heed her advice.

Also good ridance to the Elliots, those two should've never been parents and their seven unborn daughters dodged quite the bullet of having such passive-agressive a**hole of parents who wanted a robot, not a child. The irony of them being child psychologists who wrote those awful Amazing Amy books which I bet my life did more harm than they ever did good to a whole generation.

Spoiler

This is also the only point I concede to Amy, her parents not only built an empire on her back, but also inmortalized every little dissapointment and failure so that she could never forget them.

Content Warnings

deviya's review against another edition

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dark emotional mysterious tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

i—

Content Warnings

didireadthat's review against another edition

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challenging dark mysterious tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.0

Almost DNF’d this book before making it half way through. The second quarter of the book was so slow and I did not like Nick or Diary Amy at all. Right before I gave up though the book turned around and I got sucked into the mystery. An incredible web of clues and lies and plot twist I loved how everything played out. However I still never liked any of the characters and I don’t think they really grew or changed throughout the book.

Content Warnings

lukutoukkaems's review against another edition

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dark mysterious medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

Content Warnings

leialeilani's review

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challenging dark reflective tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

Would have been 4 stars if it hadn’t taken 150-200 pages to get interesting. I almost stopped reading because it was so slow to reveal anything beyond the initial setup.

Content Warnings

david_slack110507's review against another edition

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challenging dark mysterious tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

You know a book is good when even a reading slump and an admittedly slow and uneventful first part of the book can't take away from your overall enjoyment and still leaves you with the decision to rate it 5 stars. It took me a while to finish this once started for two main reasons, 1) As mentioned earlier I was in a major reading slump, so I struggled to be even interested in some amazing other books I was reading at the time such as the AGGGTM series and 2) The first part of the book was really slow and difficult to get into.

Gillian Flynn's writing is brilliant and feels much more complex than some of the other writing I've read before, the way she writes both Nick and Amy but particularly Amy is amazing (Pun intended). She makes sure that they are presented as awfully complex and toxic people yet gives them many layers that the reader can both love and hate them at the same time. I will admit that the supporting cast of characters isn't really developed beyond bits and pieces of detail, but they don't really have to be, this is a story between Nick and Amy and their complexities as characters.

The book really hits its stride when it begins its second part, reading about Amy was much more fascinating to me because she's written with such brilliance that she genuinely believes that the things she is doing are a reasonable reaction to what Nick has done. She's a well-written example of a morally complex and grey female protagonist/character. I didn't expect this book to go into such gritty detail about Amy's plan, but it made her all the more interesting in how she rationalises her behaviour whilst Nick's perspective is also intriguing as he goes from loving his wife to hating her and planning to kill her within a second's notice.

I'm really glad that I read the book rather than watch the movie first (which I will be doing soon hopefully) as I feel like I wouldn't have had the motivation to read this if I already knew what happens and if I knew how long it would take me to finish it. Looking forward to potentially reading more of Flynn's novels in the future and seeing how their adaptations fare in comparison to the source material.

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