Sunday, January 18, 2015

Book Review: Gone Girl

Book Review Gone Girl

I decided to read this book after watching a movie trailer on Youtube.  The movie trailer's footage somehow reminded me of the Scott Peterson murder case years ago and all that media frenzy that came with it.  After knowing that the movie was based on a novel of the same title, I wanted to read it to find out what was so interesting about the novel that made Ben Affleck pick it up to produce it into a movie.

Just as I originally suspected, the first part of the book, which took up almost half of the total pages, was almost like a detailed story re-telling of the Scott Peterson murder case;  that put all the news releases, the footage and the stories that we read and watched at the time into words, and detailed descriptions.  It was quite boring to me because I didn't need to read pages of words that described the news crew from the media storming Scott Peterson's home, or crowding the venue of the news conference room...  It was all Dejavu to me and I had to take many breaks so I could continue reading.  To me, the first part was just a mundane reenactment of the Scott Peterson murder case with the throw-in of the diary of the mundane life of the girl who was gone. I was bored and I wasn't interested in knowing the heroine's mundane life through her diary in the first part.

Then the story started to get good in the second part. So after I spent over a week, painstakingly forcing myself to continue with the book, I finally got to a point where all the good stuff started pouring in.  It was from there I couldn't put the book down.  After reading the whole book, I realize how smart it was for the author to tell the story from both the husband's side and the wife's side.  The parallel stories brilliantly explained and unfolded to me the "whats" and "whys" behind the twisty plots.  It's definitely a story that is inspired by the Lacy Peterson murder, but it was provoking in a way that it made me think if the truth of that case was really what I saw and heard from the media.  After all, there is always two sides of a story.  There is always more to the surface of everything we see.   The book is brilliantly written, and it's very entertaining.  But the readers have to read the entire book before they can fully enjoy it.  Now I can't wait to see the movie.