Gone Girl

⚖The case for it

On the morning of their fifth anniversary, Amy Dunne vanishes, and her husband Nick keeps saying the wrong things to the cameras. The plot does ask you to swallow a few outsized coincidences before it is done. Swallow them. The real subject is marriage: the private theater two people perform for each other until the act hardens into a cage. Flynn's Cool Girl pages are the sharpest thing written in decades about how women edit themselves for men, and the argument sits inside a thriller built to keep you up too late. Both voices are magnetic and awful. You close the book warier of everyone you love.

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

Flynn's twist machine runs flawlessly until it has to stop, and the ending mistakes refusing resolution for earning ambiguity. The late reversals bend plausibility past cracking to get there. Both narrators are loathsome by design, which works at thriller speed and curdles on reflection.

— the honest librarian