Gone Girl / Gillian Flynn

Amazing and seemingly perfect Amy goes missing on her fifth wedding anniversary. The police quickly find evidence that suggests her husband, Nick, may be implicated in her disappearance. The story is first told in Nick’s voice and subsequent chapters suggest an alternative history made up of entries from Amy’s diary, describing a disintegrating marriage and a wife increasingly fearful of her husband. The diary makes Nick look like an unbalanced husband capable of murder until halfway through the book when the narrative does a complete turnaround and we find out that Amy may not be the victim we were led to believe after all.

It’s a gripping story, one that’s not easy to put down, and has overtones of Scott Turow’s Presumed Innocent or the movie Fatal Attraction. Amy and Nick, two unreliable narrators, make this a guessing game until the finish, and the novel’s resolution will probably be a surprise to everyone. With the right cast, this will surely make a blockbuster movie.

Before I read Gone Girl I tried to read The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, but since I found it was like plodding through a literary swamp, I abandoned it after 200 pages. Two hundred pages is giving the book a fair shake, right? I felt there was so little narrative tension halfway through the novel that I just couldn’t keep with it. There was so much talk about color schemes, I swear it could have been sponsored by Sherwin Williams or HGTV. For a book about magic, I wish it had had just a little of the written magic of another circus book like Water for Elephants. It's been awhile since I've abandoned a book, but I just had to change the channel. I know people have loved this title, but for some reason it just wasn't for me.

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And the Mountains Echoed / Khaled Hosseini

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Wide Sargasso Sea / Jean Rhys

The mysterious figure of Bertha Mason provides much of the tension in Jane Eyre , but what does the reader really know about her? Rochester provides some details of her past, but is his account reliable? Caribbean author Jean Rhys attempted to tell the story of Rochester's insane (and perhaps misunderstood) wife in her 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea . It's a sort of prequel to Jane Eyre . I'm afraid Rochester doesn't come out looking good, though we always knew he had a bit of a wild side with his continental dalliances. Anyway, there's a lot of interesting backstory about Bertha's origins in Jamaica, her real name, the tragic circumstances of her upbringing, and how she was established at Thornfield Hall. Gosh, if Jane had only known all these details about Rochester, she might have taken St. John up on his offer of marriage. All in all, Wide Sargasso Sea is pretty credible, but I missed Charlotte Bronte's flowery language, and of course th...

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