Then She Was Gone by Lisa Jewell on April 17, 2018
Genres: Fiction / Family Life / General, Fiction / Thrillers / Suspense, Fiction / Women
Pages: 368
Format: Paperback
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“As the father of your children, as a friend, as someone who shared a journey with you and as someone who loves you and cares about you. I don’t need to be married to you to be all those things. Those things are deeper than marriage. Those things are forever.”
This novel follows follows Laurel Mack in her search for answers regarding her daughter Ellie’s disappearance. Through a series of flashbacks and differing points of view, we see the details of the past and the looks inside the mind of the psychopath who kidnapped Ellie, all while chronicling the steps Laurel must take to heal from the sorrow that has consumed her.
Jewell is one of my favorite writers, but this one was a fairly average experience for me. It goes down smoothly and easily, but it is so easy to predict everything that will happen. I was always several chapters ahead of the characters and it sucked a lot of tension out of the story. The writing was still very good in the aspect that Laurel’s pain over her missing daughter is palpable and realistic. The loss of Ellie felt like a real thing, not something that exists only inside a book. It’s a shame, though, that we know a major aspect of Ellie’s fate almost immediately, seeing as this is probably what I would have cared about most.
I gave this book a 3.5-star rating. The writing is strong, but it’s disappointing when you figure out all the major reveals in the first few chapters and even get the reasons behind them. As soon as certain characters are introduced, I was thinking “ah, got it” and, unfortunately, I was right. I kept hoping something exciting would happen to prove me wrong, but it really is as obvious as it seems.