📘 When She Was Gone
by Gwendolen Gross
Genre Fiction ◦ Mystery
Format & Source Print ◦ For review
Publication Gallery Books ◦ 2013
Dates Read April 3 – 12, 2013
Rating ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆
📚 What It's About
17 year old Linsey Hart disappears the day before she’s supposed to be leaving for college. No one in her small town neighborhood knows where she has gone, but everyone has their own thoughts and opinions about it, and some people try to piece together what happened to her. This story is told from multiple perspectives from several of Linsey’s neighbors, all of whom have their own stories and secrets to hide from one another.
📝 My Review
I have always loved reading stories about missing people and disappearances. To me, the search and the putting together of the various puzzle pieces is an absolute thrill ride. Two of my favorite books from this category are The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold, and The Year of Fog, by Michelle Richmond. Hand me a book about a missing persons case, and I will definitely read it. That being said, I was definitely excited when I heard about When She Was Gone.
The story was extremely mysterious, and the author did an excellent job of keeping it all a mystery until the end. I had no idea what had happened to Linsey and it kept me guessing the whole way through. I also enjoyed the multiple perspectives and narration. It was interesting to see the thoughts that Linsey’s various neighbors and friends had about the disappearance, and to see what they knew or didn’t know about it.
Despite these great things about the novel, I was slightly disappointed by a few aspects. I felt that the story tended to focus a bit too much on the lives of her neighbors rather than the disappearance. We learned a lot about the other people in the story, which I liked, but only to a certain extent. I thought that the focus was oftentimes on those little side stories, which I wasn’t always interested in, as I wanted to know about Linsey. Additionally, this story was written in a poetic way with absolutely beautiful writing which I can totally appreciate, but in this case, I felt that the lyrical writing masked the urgency that is typically seen in a missing persons case. It tended to slow the story down a bit, when I usually like reading really fast moving stories when it comes to disappearances. The ending / climax was also slightly a let down and not as thrilling as I’d hoped for.
I definitely was interested in this story and enjoyed the mystery of if all, but for me, it was a bit slow moving as a missing persons story which prevented me from really loving it. Definitely give it a shot though if you enjoy mysteries!
No comments