Books: The Good Girl, 2014 A Novel by Mary Kubica

Publishers Weekly needs to apologize for false advertising! The jacket quotes a review from them claiming that the book "will encourage comparisons with Gone Girl...." What a nonsense and a lie!
The book is a weak attempt at fiction writing by a housewife well-read in romance novels. The story could be transplanted in a fantasy "medieval" setting and could well be told as, for example, the story of a princess abducted by a Highlands shepherd who eventually fall in love. It is totally phony, banal, and boring. Too many pages dedicated to describing physical details don't make a "psychological" novel. Literally describing looking, touching, walking, sitting, glancing, driving, etc. and doing all kinds of things a physical presence in the world comprises, is not the "detail" that fiction is made of. It fills pages. The author should go back to her other hobbies like "gardening, photography and taking care of animals in the local shelter" or find another way to make her kids proud of her, different from the fact that "mommy wrote a book."

Books: Gone Girl. A Novel by Gillian Flynn, 2012

It is a smart, well written novel in the tradition of Patricia Highsmith. It is very hard to follow in her footsteps but Ms Flynn manages to do that pretty well. The novel follows a very complex structure and especially in the second half when the "trick" with Amy's diary is revealed, walks on the razor's edge trying to balance logic and conflicting psychological motivations. Often it seems the author is almost about to trip switching between the narratives of He and She but eventually manages to pull it off neatly, collect all loose ends and turn it all into one huge metaphor of male-female love-hate stand-off and psychological warfare. “One situation – maybe one alone – could drive me to murder: family life, togetherness” Patricia Highsmith is quoted to have said...Ms Flynn's novel is an intricate illustration of that statement with a little bit of Porfiry Petrovich thrown in -- his role being played by a female local cop...The language is witty with that type of wittiness that misleadingly steers the reader into "chick-lit" territory only to make them realize later that this genre affiliation is severely ironically undermined.