Ana V.

I can't be bothered to make this a spoiler free review.

There will be a lot of spoilers.

review:

What.. the fuck was that?

Definitely, one of the more confusing books I have read in some time.

Nick and Amy look like the perfect couple: beautiful, rich, intelligent, and more importantly, in love with each other. They get married and begins their life, happy to have each other around. For the first three years of marriage, their lives are perfect: they like being wed to each other, they love their Manhattan house, they are content with not having kids yet and they still get along perfectly. But, as Nick's parents get ill, they move to his hometown, which is a small town in West America, where there is not much excitement in daily life. From now on, their marital life only gets worse. They become strangers living in the same house, they start fighting and in the end, stop loving each other. After only 5 years of marriage, their love was a pitiful shipwreck, only hurting both of them.

One day, Nick gets a call from his neighbour who tells him his front door is open and his cat is on the stairs. Nick doen't think much of it, but gets home to see what the problem is.

He soon realizes his wife, Amy, is missing.

It was their 5th anniversary, and she had left him a clue, as always, in order for him to complete the game he does every year. But this year, she wasn't there to take him through it.

And there are clues: there's been blood on the kitches floor and someone cleaned it; the house is a mess; Nick has debts on credit cards he's never even touched before.

Where is Amy?

*whisper*spoilerssssss

AMY IS FUCKING WITH Y'ALL! You think she's the missing housewife that we should all feel sorry for? No, folks, she's doing it herself! She's been planning her own death for over a year, and she's damned good at planning things. She cut herself inside her elbow and bled on the kitched floor for ten full minutes, and then cleaned it up herself in order to make it look like Nick did it. She faked a pregnancy by using the tester with a neighbour's pee on it. She's been stealing and keeping money for a year, so she could have only cash when she has to dissapear. Shé would be good for an engineer, the way she has every little detail sorted out.

But what's her purpose, why does she so badly want to be dead? She wants to destroy Nick. She wants to put him in prison and let him sit on the execution chair and die. She wants him gone, but she wants to torture him first.

The writing in the first part of the book, before you find out what Amy is really doing, is not that good. Didn't particularly like it and I guess it's why people gave up on the book and deemed it for a really bad piece.

But afterwards.. See, you think you have it all figured out, you selfish, silly reader, you do - maybe he killed her and he doesn't remember; maybe he was framed; it does go through your mind that maybe she framed him, yes. You've read too many books by now to really be surprised by anything. Any new plot twist is just an old plot twist rearranged. So your surprise when you find out what a cunt Amy is doesn't reach gasping levels. But now, the fun begins. How much, really how much can you hate Amy's character. She isn't just framing Nick, she's framing the world, playing her little game on a country-wide basis and, what do you know, winning at it. She planned everything. She even sorted out the variables in her equation and attached them to her strings. She is everything you want a sociopath to be.

Even so, she doesn't get off from the actual murder, she doesn't care for blood being spilled. She wants to mentally ruin someone; wants to demolate said human until even his ashes burn themselves some more. Nick shouldn't die yet, because the game would stop and the thrill will be gone, and she's in this only because it's fun.

Nick himself isn't a sweetie, either. He cheats on his wife, a thing which I find despicable in a man. If you marry someone, stop fucking around. I don't care if you haven't fucked your wife in three years or if she doesn't look like she used to and you don't want to touch her anymore. You either talk to her about it or get a freaking divorce. Never, under any circumstance, should you cheat. You see a piece of young meat on the street and you'd like to get some of that, fine. You watch porn, fine. You jack off by your own, fine. Your woman shouldn't always be the center of your sex life, humans weren't built that way. But you took a commitment, jack ass, and you'd better respect it. I have no problem with my man flirting a little with other women or struttin around like a peacock, because a little sexual pride doesn't hurt anybody. But cheating? Never.

There were parts in this book that I really liked.

“Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl.

Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they’re fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl. For a long time Cool Girl offended me. I used to see men – friends, coworkers, strangers – giddy over these awful pretender women, and I’d want to sit these men down and calmly say: You are not dating a woman, you are dating a woman who has watched too many movies written by socially awkward men who’d like to believe that this kind of woman exists and might kiss them. I’d want to grab the poor guy by his lapels or messenger bag and say: The bitch doesn’t really love chili dogs that much – no one loves chili dogs that much! And the Cool Girls are even more pathetic: They’re not even pretending to be the woman they want to be, they’re pretending to be the woman a man wants them to be. Oh, and if you’re not a Cool Girl, I beg you not to believe that your man doesn’t want the Cool Girl. It may be a slightly different version – maybe he’s a vegetarian, so Cool Girl loves seitan and is great with dogs; or maybe he’s a hipster artist, so Cool Girl is a tattooed, bespectacled nerd who loves comics. There are variations to the window dressing, but believe me, he wants Cool Girl, who is basically the girl who likes every fucking thing he likes and doesn’t ever complain. (How do you know you’re not Cool Girl? Because he says things like: “I like strong women.” If he says that to you, he will at some point fuck someone else. Because “I like strong women” is code for “I hate strong women.”)”

“For several years, I had been bored. Not a whining, restless child's boredom (although I was not above that) but a dense blanketing malaise. It seemed to me that there was nothing new to be discovered ever again. Our society was utterly, ruinously derivative (although the word derivative as a criticism is itself derivative). We were the first human beings who would never see see anything for the first time. We stare at the wonders of the world, dull-eyed, underwhelmed. Mona Lisa, the Pyramids, the Empire State Building. Jungle animals on attack, ancient icebergs collapsing, volcanoes erupting. I can't recall a single amazing thing I have seen firsthand that I didn't immediately reference to a movie or TV show. A commercial. You know the awful singsong of blase: Seeeen it. I've literally seen it all, and the worst thing, the thing that makes me want to blow my brains out, is: The secondhand experience is always better. The image is crisper, the view is keener, the camera angle and soundtrack manipulate my emotions in a way reality really can't anymore. I don't know that we are actually human at this point, those of us who are like most of us, who grew up with TV and movies and now the Internet. If we are betrayed, we know the words to say; when a loved one dies, we know the words to say. If we want to play the stud or the smart-ass or the fool, we know the words to say. We are all working from the same dog-eared scripted.

It's a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless automat of characters.

And if all of us are play-acting, there can be no such thing as a soul mate, because we don't have genuine souls.

It had gotten to the point where it seemed like nothing matters, because I'm not a real person and neither is anyone else.

I would have done anything to feel real again.”

So there is good writing in this, and it's impressive how Flynn takes today's society and disects it, through the book, making you see different aspects of it under different circumstances and understand how are thing actually wrong and what we should change.

And all this time, Amy is free and on the loose, and she's winning the game...