Audiobook: Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

Read by  Julia Whelan & Kirby Heyborne

Time: 19 hours 22 minutes 

On a warm summer morning in North Carthage, Missouri, it is Nick and Amy Dunne's fifth wedding anniversary. Presents are being wrapped and reservations are being made when Nick's clever and beautiful wife disappears. Husband-of-the-Year Nick isn't doing himself any favors with cringe-worthy daydreams about the slope and shape of his wife's head, but passages from Amy's diary reveal the alpha-girl perfectionist could have put anyone dangerously on edge. Under mounting pressure from the police and the media--as well as Amy's fiercely doting parents--the town golden boy parades an endless series of lies, deceits, and inappropriate behavior. Nick is oddly evasive, and he's definitely bitter--but is he really a killer?

Overdrive  *  Audible

*Review contains spoilers*

My Thoughts: I've heard many things about this book, especially when the movie came out. I was told to read it for it had shocking twists. I gave the audiobook a try hoping that it would make my commute to work thrilling, plus I would be able to finally "read" Gone Girl. It sure was an interesting ride. 

It took a few chapters in before I became enthralled with the story. Amy went missing and Nick was desperate trying to figure out what happened to her. Very soon the police suspect that foul play happened and that Nick was responsible for it. The story was told between Nick's point-of-view of what was happening at the moment and Amy's diary entries (later Amy's point-of-view of the moment). While listening to the plot, I immediately made two guesses as to what happened: Nick murdered his wife and simply "forgot" about it due to trauma, or Amy faked her own disappearance. When the truth was revealed about half-way, I was not too surprised. Of course I did not expect just how manipulative Amy turned out to be and how things concluded. I was not shocked like many people were claiming would happen but the plot was still exciting. 

The two main characters, Nick and Amy, were definitely a piece of work. Nick was simply despicable. I disliked him from the beginning. I did not like how Nick treated his wife before the disappearance and I especially detested that he was a cheater. My feelings for Nick slightly changed towards the second half of the book...slightly. As awful as I found him, I still did not feel that he deserved to be treated as a murderer. Next, Amy was a scary character. At first, she was described as a doting wife who was loving and caring. When the truth came out, it was frightening to realize who she truly was. The lengths that she went to get what she wanted was disgusting. It was crazy to think that people were capable to do the things that Amy did. So at the end, these two characters were terrible people but they absolutely deserved each other. 

I highly enjoyed the narrators of this audio, Julia Whelan and Kirby Heyborne. Usually having more than one reader is a hit or miss for me, but this one turned out to be the former. Both readers were able to capture their characters extremely well and were able to express the situations with intensity that I was able to feel myself in the story. They both kept the plot lively and suspenseful. Whelan and Heyborne did an excellent job.

As a whole, this audio production of Gone Girl was well done. The narrators brought this crazy story to life. I was hooked and appalled at the same time with what Nick and Amy described. I was not as surprised with the twists since I found it to be predictable, but it was still engaging. I rate it: