-Amarantha Lockdon( written during a head cold while under the influence of Nyquil)

Wowee what a journey! Lisa Jewell took us on a rollercoaster with this one. “Then She was gone” brought the action, drama heartache, perspective, and most of all Characters!

Medium Spoilers AHEAD!!

Lisa freakin Jewell. This book was not what I expected. The story opens up with a missing girl, and a broken family who is tired of searching for her. First of all I started out hating the mom(Laurel) and kind of feeling like she was the villain of the story in a way. I suspected that her daughter Hannah might even have been driven to the point of harming her sister because of her mothers favoritism. As the story unfolds however I found that Laurel was just an ordinary mother with her own quirks and fickle moments and Hannah was just a little girl with her frustrations. Even Ellie the infamous missing, perfect girl, was just a normal girl who was a bit spoiled. Lisa didn’t write characters simply to manhandle her plot along, as many authors do, instead she wrote genuine flawed people who occasionally manage to get it right.

BIG SPOILIES!!

While we are on the subject of characters there are two main characters that absolutely demand to be discussed. Floyd and Noelle. I personally expected Floyd to be the main villain. He was the too-good-to-be-true boyfriend who had a child that miraculously looked just like the missing girl around the right age to be hers before she died. Once again Lisa tricked me. Floyd was too good to be true, and Floyd was complicit, but ultimately he was just a weak man who consistently gave into his base nature. Even Noelle, the disgusting evil witch of the story, is a coherent, understandable character. Noelle is an unimpressive human living a normal life who wants to be the main character. Noelle’s ultimate downfall is not evil intention but self obsession. She doesn’t want to hurt Ellie, she wants to help herself, and what does it matter if someone gets inconvenienced along the way. In the end it seems that all Ellies death was to her was an inconvenience.

Ultimately Lisa didn’t give us a big bad villain who is satisfyingly vanquished so that the hero’s can win. She wrote us a tale of how the world damages us and we lie to ourselves and slide down slippery slopes. How we ignore things that we shouldn’t and abandon people who need us. It is a story of different people with different kinds of flaws all trying to live in a hard world.

I’m hesitant to give out 5 stars to any book but this one really did it for me.

The character writing was 5 star, the mystery was 5 star, the flow of the story was immaculate, I adored her use of perspective to get into the head of each of the main characters. I APPRECIATED the screen going dark before the most gruesome moments and I will absolutely be reading more books by this author!