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Elizabeth Is Missing is a book that I absolutely loved, it's all about the protagonists slow slide into dementia, and through the book you follow her getting muddled over the present with her friend Elizabeth going missing, and the past where her sister Sukey suddenly disappeared shortly after the Second World War had ended. The reviews on goodreads seemed a bit mixed, and I feel like how much you enjoyed it depends on whether you viewed it as a mystery or not? There were quite a few complaints from readers expecting more of a mystery, but I enjoyed (if that's the right word!) the book more as a very moving look at how Maude's mind was slowly deteriorating. The mystery was really only there as a device to frame Maude's confusion between her present and past IMO, rather than being the point of the book, but apparently some people got annoyed because there was a lot of hype over it being a thriller/comparisons to Gone Girl
From early on it seemed pretty obvious that Elizabeth wasn't really missing at all, everyone around Maude was just tired of repeating themselves over and over again. I thought that the final twist was a good one though with how it tied into the mystery of her sister going missing so many years before, and I found the ending pretty hard-hitting with the implication that Maude's mind was completely gone by then and she was never going to stop trying to find Elizabeth/Sukey
My one nitpick would be that, considering Maude was always writing notes to remind herself, it seems odd in retrospect that Helen never told her to write down that Elizabeth is in hospital as a reminder :shrugs: Oh and I also found it odd that Helen let it go on for as long as she did, maybe she was partly in denial I suppose, but from the beginning it seemed clear that Maude was no longer capable of living alone! Helen seemed very concerned about her mother, so you'd have expected Helen to move Maude in with her much sooner than she did, instead of leaving her to constantly wonder off on her own and get lost. Writing notes as a reminder that Maude wasn't to cook or make sandwiches etc was all very well, but seemed rather pointless when Maude was never shown to take any of it in
And then The Dead House was a bit of a disappointment for me after the premise drew me in, but I seem to be the lone weirdo that wasn't absolutely blown away by it :( It's YA and focused on 'the Johnson Incident' and what led up to it, we follow the diary of Kaitlyn who shares a body with Carly, and the question is raised of whether she suffers from disassociate identity disorder, or whether there's a paranormal explanation for everything. The premise seemed like an intriguing one, but I found that I just could not get that into it, one of my main issues was that I felt like the way it was written ended up keeping me at a distance from the characters (it's all told through descriptions of video footage, transcripts of therapy sessions, interviews, and the diary entries). I'd argue that the supporting characters were really underdeveloped as well, I found most of their voices in the group scenes pretty generic, it was really only Kaitlyn and Nadia that stood out most of the time. Well and Ari I guess
As for the ending, I dunno I always got the feeling that we were supposed to believe that there was a supernatural explanation, but personally I prefer the interpretation that Kaitlyn was mentally disturbed and that there was some kind of group psychosis going on. I was a lot more interested in that angle, and the diary entries where Kaitlyn was starting to mentally unravel, than I was in the witchcraft, voodoo etc scenes. But yeah I'm not sure how ambiguous it was actually supposed to be though, it always seemed pretty clear that we were meant to buy the paranormal explanation as the only one/share Kaitlyn's frustration at not being believed, it's really mostly the ending that encourages you to question whether there could be an alternative explanation.
I would have liked to have found more reader discussion on it actually, it would be interesting to hear what people's theories were, but unfortunately I couldn't find much, just the usual spoiler-free reviews mostly. Also the title made it a challenging book to google, I kept getting results for similarly titled popular movies instead!
And finally The Light Of The Fireflies was a book that I had very mixed feelings on. It was certainly well-written and engrossing when it came to the first half of the book, it's told through the eyes of a ten year old boy who has spend his entire life living with his family in a basement for reasons that he doesn't yet understand, and it leaves you very curious to find out what exactly happened to this family. But I had MANY issues with what seemed to be the final moral I'd been so rooting for the boy to escape and for his sister to finally have her freedom, so it really left me feeling sick how it ended for her instead, and then I didn't quite know what to make of the final flashforward. It seemed like the author expected our sympathies to be torn after the truth came out, "I wonder whether I'd have done the same thing. Whether I wouldn't do anything in my power to protect him". It felt like the message was that they should ultimately be seen as a loving family that made terrible decisions to stay together, when really they were incredibly sick and dysfunctional people
Maybe I'm being too hard on the author and reading his intentions wrong, but he did seem to be coming at it as if he was presenting some sort of grand twist on how badly we misjudged the father. At first we were led to assume it was a similar situation to Room where the Dad was locking the family away to sexually abuse them, and then it seemed like he wanted us to question all of that when we found out that in fact they were there to protect their eldest son, and that the father was only ~acting~ cruel to the little boy to encourage him to leave the basement, and that of course he wasn't the one responsible for his daughters pregnancy and how terrible of her to imply it. That's all well and good, but he still kept his daughter imprisoned there so that she would keep their sick secret, he still degraded his daughter every day of her life and made vomiting sounds whenever he caught sight of her face, he still forced his daughter to wear a mask so that he wouldn't have to look at her face, so it was a little hard to be touched by them as a close-knit family!
And certainly the family apparently never bothered protecting their daughter/granddaughter from their known rapist son when they were all locked up down there, and then she was forced into giving birth and raising the child. The whole thing really left a bad taste in my mouth, especially with the way that the girl received no conflicted feelings of love from her family whatsoever, she was the bad seed and that was it, but of course they were all sickingly fawning over the son no matter what he did! For the boy to take over being their outside caretaker, even after his sister was beaten to death in the basement, that was not an ending that I saw any 'light' in
From early on it seemed pretty obvious that Elizabeth wasn't really missing at all, everyone around Maude was just tired of repeating themselves over and over again. I thought that the final twist was a good one though with how it tied into the mystery of her sister going missing so many years before, and I found the ending pretty hard-hitting with the implication that Maude's mind was completely gone by then and she was never going to stop trying to find Elizabeth/Sukey
My one nitpick would be that, considering Maude was always writing notes to remind herself, it seems odd in retrospect that Helen never told her to write down that Elizabeth is in hospital as a reminder :shrugs: Oh and I also found it odd that Helen let it go on for as long as she did, maybe she was partly in denial I suppose, but from the beginning it seemed clear that Maude was no longer capable of living alone! Helen seemed very concerned about her mother, so you'd have expected Helen to move Maude in with her much sooner than she did, instead of leaving her to constantly wonder off on her own and get lost. Writing notes as a reminder that Maude wasn't to cook or make sandwiches etc was all very well, but seemed rather pointless when Maude was never shown to take any of it in
And then The Dead House was a bit of a disappointment for me after the premise drew me in, but I seem to be the lone weirdo that wasn't absolutely blown away by it :( It's YA and focused on 'the Johnson Incident' and what led up to it, we follow the diary of Kaitlyn who shares a body with Carly, and the question is raised of whether she suffers from disassociate identity disorder, or whether there's a paranormal explanation for everything. The premise seemed like an intriguing one, but I found that I just could not get that into it, one of my main issues was that I felt like the way it was written ended up keeping me at a distance from the characters (it's all told through descriptions of video footage, transcripts of therapy sessions, interviews, and the diary entries). I'd argue that the supporting characters were really underdeveloped as well, I found most of their voices in the group scenes pretty generic, it was really only Kaitlyn and Nadia that stood out most of the time. Well and Ari I guess
As for the ending, I dunno I always got the feeling that we were supposed to believe that there was a supernatural explanation, but personally I prefer the interpretation that Kaitlyn was mentally disturbed and that there was some kind of group psychosis going on. I was a lot more interested in that angle, and the diary entries where Kaitlyn was starting to mentally unravel, than I was in the witchcraft, voodoo etc scenes. But yeah I'm not sure how ambiguous it was actually supposed to be though, it always seemed pretty clear that we were meant to buy the paranormal explanation as the only one/share Kaitlyn's frustration at not being believed, it's really mostly the ending that encourages you to question whether there could be an alternative explanation.
I would have liked to have found more reader discussion on it actually, it would be interesting to hear what people's theories were, but unfortunately I couldn't find much, just the usual spoiler-free reviews mostly. Also the title made it a challenging book to google, I kept getting results for similarly titled popular movies instead!
And finally The Light Of The Fireflies was a book that I had very mixed feelings on. It was certainly well-written and engrossing when it came to the first half of the book, it's told through the eyes of a ten year old boy who has spend his entire life living with his family in a basement for reasons that he doesn't yet understand, and it leaves you very curious to find out what exactly happened to this family. But I had MANY issues with what seemed to be the final moral I'd been so rooting for the boy to escape and for his sister to finally have her freedom, so it really left me feeling sick how it ended for her instead, and then I didn't quite know what to make of the final flashforward. It seemed like the author expected our sympathies to be torn after the truth came out, "I wonder whether I'd have done the same thing. Whether I wouldn't do anything in my power to protect him". It felt like the message was that they should ultimately be seen as a loving family that made terrible decisions to stay together, when really they were incredibly sick and dysfunctional people
Maybe I'm being too hard on the author and reading his intentions wrong, but he did seem to be coming at it as if he was presenting some sort of grand twist on how badly we misjudged the father. At first we were led to assume it was a similar situation to Room where the Dad was locking the family away to sexually abuse them, and then it seemed like he wanted us to question all of that when we found out that in fact they were there to protect their eldest son, and that the father was only ~acting~ cruel to the little boy to encourage him to leave the basement, and that of course he wasn't the one responsible for his daughters pregnancy and how terrible of her to imply it. That's all well and good, but he still kept his daughter imprisoned there so that she would keep their sick secret, he still degraded his daughter every day of her life and made vomiting sounds whenever he caught sight of her face, he still forced his daughter to wear a mask so that he wouldn't have to look at her face, so it was a little hard to be touched by them as a close-knit family!
And certainly the family apparently never bothered protecting their daughter/granddaughter from their known rapist son when they were all locked up down there, and then she was forced into giving birth and raising the child. The whole thing really left a bad taste in my mouth, especially with the way that the girl received no conflicted feelings of love from her family whatsoever, she was the bad seed and that was it, but of course they were all sickingly fawning over the son no matter what he did! For the boy to take over being their outside caretaker, even after his sister was beaten to death in the basement, that was not an ending that I saw any 'light' in
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Date: 2016-03-23 04:22 pm (UTC)Gabrielle
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Date: 2016-03-23 04:50 pm (UTC)It was a book that I really enjoyed when it was told through the innocent perspective of the little boy who had been born in the basement, but it really became quite disturbing in the final section when the author seemed to want to present it as ambiguous as to how far you should go to protect your family. It made a lot more sense when I was assuming that we were meant to be repulsed by how twisted and dysfunctional they were, but instead it seemed like he intended for his ~twist~ to throw a new light on everything, and for the reader to then question what choices we might have made in their place
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Date: 2016-03-23 04:26 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2016-03-23 04:51 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2016-03-23 05:59 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2016-03-23 05:58 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2016-03-23 06:06 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2016-03-23 09:06 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2016-03-23 09:59 pm (UTC)And yeah I was really drawn in by the third book as I was reading it, but I didn't know what to make of the ending. I was so let down that the sister never got out in the end after all the build-up to their escape plan, but idk it seemed to almost be presented as a happy ending that the boy continued protecting his family in the basement