I have a confession about Gone Girl...
I had it completely written it off.
I'm obsessed with thrillers just like anyone else, but this book sounded dumb to me. I mean, "what's in the gift box"? Seriously? So I never read it. It was made into a movie. I never planned on seeing it. People keep telling me it's amazing and I just did the "yeah....sure...." head nod. Then I saw it on sale for $2.99 on Amazon.
This book sure was a surprise! I went in with low expectations, but I ended up getting sucked in and finishing it within 24 hours. Very unexpected...
Overall I really enjoyed the plot. Like I said, I love thrillers and especially love crime stories. Although I personally think Amy overreacted a tad bit to news of her husband's infidelity (you could have tried to confront him...), I can see why that happened within the context of her past. Amy is a straight up sociopath, and as such basically lives off of manipulation. Hearing about what she did to other people in her life was quite disturbing.
What really got me about this book was how it was presented to the reader. I fell for the lie making up the first half of the book, as I'm sure most readers did. I didn't know there was going to be some crazy plot twist, so of course I wasn't expecting it. Imagine my surprise when it comes out that Amy is framing her husband for her own murder.
But the second half, I was not a fan. Yeah Amy set up this whole thing just because her husband cheated on her, but it was a bit too fantastic for me to believe. Amy's whole plot against her husband was convoluted to a fault, and all the resolution was very convenient. There is no way that that kind of plan could work in real life, with such dependency on the separate pieces that the plan needed to work perfectly. It even mentions in the book how conveniently things seemed to have worked out for Amy (according to her public account). I was mad when they couldn't dig up ANYTHING on her.
One thing that was interesting was how fast my loyalties shifted. The first half, I felt bad for Amy (but didn't necessarily demand Nick's head). In the second half, I grew to hate Amy with each passing page. The fact that she feels like she has the right to upright someone's entire life because she can't have an adult conversation about infidelity really bothered me. It also seriously bothered me that she got away with it and expected and demanded Nick to pretend to be a happy family with her. She not only financially but reproductively (?) blackmailed her husband into staying with her and lying to cover her ass. Knowing your husband is only with you because you got pregnant has got to be the worst feeling ever, but I didn't feel bad for her at all. I mean, is she even capable of emotion?? I did feel bad for Nick. He wasn't lying when he said Amy was the most interesting girl he'd ever met. He just didn't know how much she would fuck up his life.