Then She Was Gone by Lisa Jewell

Amy  

mystery

Told from alternating “now” and “then” timeframes, Then She Was Gone describes Ellie’s family’s ups and downs since the time she disappeared ten years earlier. It’s taken ten years for some new developments to come to light and for Ellie’s mother, Laurel, to emerge from her fog.

I was worried about reading Then She Was Gone. Kidnappings and disappearances really scare me, personally. I was concerned this book might bring on some nightmares. Told from Laurel’s and Ellie’s points of view, Laurel progresses through the understandable variety of feelings one would expect of a mother whose child has disappeared. Then, ten years after the disappearance (and still within the first quarter of the novel), Laurel meets a man who breaks her out of her constant depression.

At that point of the novel, I had a good idea of where this plot was going. Thankfully, my worst fears weren’t met but it was still a terrible tale. In homage, the novel even referenced one of my all-time least favorite novels, The Lovely Bones, which was all about a tortured, kidnapped teenage girl. Thankfully, Then She Was Gone wasn’t as upsetting.  If you get through the first quarter of the novel and want to keep reading, I imagine you’ll finish it. But if you are very upset by the topics, just know that it’s bad but not as bad as it could be. It’s definitely my least favorite Lisa Jewell novel because of the topic. But Laurel is a calm, rational protagonist which helped defray my anxiety a little. And the ending was actually tied up extremely neatly—almost too neatly. In fact, the epilogue was entirely gratuitous.

The narrator, Helen Duff, was a good voice actor and had some variety of voices and accents. However, why she chose to give two young women in the story such low voices is a mystery to me. They were ridiculously low--lower than any of the male characters--and took me out of the story every time one of them spoke. I'll give her an A-.