Brenda Cooper

Reading Recommendation: Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

October 6th 2012 at 6:10 am

Fair warning: Gone Girl is NOT a genre book.  But it’s worth reading, especially for my writer friends.   I picked it up for stress relief – to get away from the books I usually read.  It did succeed on that level.  But more, it’s one of the best unreliable narrator pieces of work I’ve seen at this length in a long time.  An unreliable narrator is easy in short fiction, or at least “sort of” easy.  It’s a technique that allows no mistakes.  I’ve found it very hard to sustain well, even for long stories,  And here Gillian Flynn has pulled it off for a whole book. Gone Girl is a really, really good example of a novel length unreliable narrator.

It’s also good for hooks and tension and twists.  This is a book where I actually disliked both main characters almost immediately, and certainly by the end of the book. But I kept reading.

I found this book to be a nice escape, delightfully well-written, and a good book to learn technique from.  It was also very different from almost anything else I’ve read.  That’s a good thing!

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