PB Fingers August Book Club: Gone Girl

Happy Labor Day everyone Hope you all are enjoying a beautiful day off!

 

 

 

Yesterday, Brent and I headed over to Oakland Beach in Warwick, RI for some delicious seafood from Iggy’s and gorgeous views of the ocean.

 

 

Of course, I had to order my whole clam dinner with a side of clam chowder, and Brent got his usual calamari. We also split an order of cheese fries and an Iggy Float (a rootbeer float made with their own homemade soda).

Despite being only 75˚F, the beach was crowded and we almost didn’t find a place to park! There were only a few brave souls actually in the water, but plenty of people were outside enjoying the nice weather and celebrating Labor Day in style with a huge plate of seafood from one of the nearby restaurants.

 

Brent and I took a picture together as we waited in the (surprisingly not incredibly long) line to order our food.

Doesn’t Brent’s new haircut look awesome?! The hair dresser actually made a mistake and gave him a buzz cut instead of using the clippers, but I think it looks awesome. I’m trying to convince him to keep it this way

Now let’s compare that picture to a picture I took of me and Brent waiting in line to get Iggy’s a little over a year ago…

When I was taking the picture on the left yesterday, I remembered something funny. In both of these pictures, Brent has a weird hair thing going on. This time, it was the buzz cut mistake and last year’s was right after Brent shaved his beard off for the first time since I met him.

Okay, but it’s not just me, right? Left Brent is HOT. Sorry, Right Brent… I think I lucked out this year

I’m also wearing the same exact pair of sunglasses. But I’m 13 pounds lighter! (Or something around there. I wasn’t really weighing myself back then). Oh yeah, I forgot to tell you guys. I lost another pound this past week! Woohoo! That makes it officially 13 pounds down this summer (I started losing weight right at the beginning of June)!! I’m so excited and proud of myself. The Miranda Plan (what I’ve awkwardly started calling my healthy goals checklist in my head, haha) is working!

For the first time, I’m participating in the Peanut Butter Fingers Book Club and I’m so excited! Way back at the beginning of the month, I dove right into reading Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn and finished it in just a few days.

(Spoilers coming…)

This book is AWESOME. Right from the first page, I was completely enthralled and could barely put the thing down. It was so mysterious… I’ve honestly never read a book like this before in my life. I wholeheartedly recommend reading this book if you haven’t already!

Right from the very beginning, I got sucked into the vortex of this book and flip-flopped every couple of minutes on who I thought was the “bad” character. I think that readers naturally try to work this out in their heads when they’re reading a book. Who’s the good guy? Who should I be rooting for? Who’s my favorite character? Who’s going to live happily-ever-after at the end? This book flips all of those questions upside-down. What if there isn’t a good character? What if things aren’t just black-and-white? This book did an amazing job portraying the real-life difficulty of having to decide whether or not you like somebody, instead of using the cookie-cutter one-dimension all “good” or all “bad” character that a lot of books (even the really good one!) seem to use.

The author also chose to use what I thought was a brilliant technique with her narration. Normally when you read a book, you come to fully trust the narrator after the first few pages. You know who they are, what they do, and what they’re thinking all the time. The reader and the narrator start out the book with just that kind of relationship… but then all of sudden he reveals an enormous secret that has previously been kept from you. For example, we don’t learn that Nick is having an affair until wayyyy down the road in the story. I had already decided that I trusted and liked this character when he came out-of-the-blue and told me something that I was completely clueless about. Immediately, I became suspicious of every single thing that had gone on in the book up until that point. I love how this again mirrors real-life. Everybody most likely has people in their lives that they trust 100% and who they think they know everything about. But you never know… one day that person could spring a secret on you that would completely change your opinion of them. The author of this novel takes this principle and uses it as a technique in the narration. The unspoken truth that you can trust a narrator is the glue that is literally holding everything together in just about every single novel you will ever read. This type of narration is ground-breaking. How do I know what is the truth and what isn’t, if the narrator is allowed to lie to me? 

Even after the reader finds out about Nick’s affair, I still flip-flopped a hundred more times. Now that I knew I couldn’t trust anybody in this book, I began to see things in a whole different light. Some chapters I thought that Nick killed Amy, but the next chapter I would 100% think that Amy was kidnapped, then five seconds later I would completely believe that she’d faked her own death. This book has so many levels to it – the personalities are so complicated to navigate and hard to wrap your head around. Of course it turns out that Amy is way crazier than any of us could’ve originally imagined, but I honestly didn’t see that coming at all and didn’t fully believe it until the very last page. And at no point while I was reading this book did I have any idea how it was going to end.

As an English major, I was just wrapped around the little finger of this book. I have never read anything like it and don’t know if I ever will. This novel was more like a psychology experiment instead of a story, and I can’t get enough of it.