Book Club

Welcome to A Peony for your Thoughts Book Club. Up for discussion today is Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn. I started hearing buzz about this book from my two most reliable resources- Kathie Lee and Hoda on the Today Show. After seeing it on their show I made a quick reminder in my phone notes to buy it and forgot all about it. It wasn't until I saw someone reading this book on a plane that I remembered that I needed to buy it and get reading before school started again and I ran out of time.

I finally bought the book in August and embarrassingly just finished it this past weekend. I do not want that to be an indication of how much I liked it, because I LOVED it, but would find myself holding my eyelids open as I tried to read just a chapter a night. It was an absolute page-turner and I would have loved to stay up through the night and finished it but my body wouldn't let me. 

The beautiful and clever Amy and her journalist-turned-bar owner husband, Nick, are five years into a marriage that, to put it mildly, hasn't gone as planned. Cut loose from their New York magazine jobs, forced to dig deep into Amy's trust fund to bail out her fiscally hapless parents, hit with news that Nick's mom is fatally ill, they swap their Brooklyn brownstone for a rented McMansion in Nick's recession-busted Mississippi River hometown of Carthage, Mo.

Then, on their fifth anniversary, something else goes terribly wrong: Nick returns home to find the front door open, signs of struggle, and Amy mysteriously gone. The disappearance quickly gains widespread attention, in large part because Amy happens to be "Amazing Amy"—the real-life inspiration for her psychologist parents' best-selling children's book series.

The urgent search for answers moves along parallel tracks. While detectives embark on an official missing person investigation, Nick pursues a trail of clues meant for him alone: messages in a scavenger hunt orchestrated by Amy, designed to lead him step-by-step to a surprise anniversary gift. This annual marital tradition has been an ongoing sore point, another fault line in the couple's crumbling storybook romance. Do Nick's failures to tap into his wife's thinking reflect a troubling narcissism and waning commitment to his marriage? Or is something else going on? Who is Amy really?

This book jerked me each and every way. I usually can tell where a story is headed, and this one threw me for a loop, well really about six loops. The minds of the characters are so twisted that you get drawn in just to discover you have no idea what is coming next. I found myself taking this book in the car to read at stoplights. While I was enjoying this, my fellow drivers were not.

If you are looking for a great read, then I recommend Gone Girl; you can even borrow my copy.

My next great read? I am not sure yet, but Nicole had some good recommendations here

Always looking for good suggestions!