What Are You Reading?
What Are You Reading? A project sponsored by the Friends of the Macomb Public Library District to encourage reading and book discussion in our community. Would you like to share your favorite books with other readers? Please send your name, occupation or grade level, book author and title, and a brief statement about the book and why you liked it to Kate Joswick, [email protected].
Reviewer’s Name: Mary Elizabeth Vos Reviewer’s Occupation: Retired Book Title: Then She Was Gone Book’s Author: Lisa Jewell In Then She Was Gone by Lisa Jewell the main character, Laurel, has always had a special relationship with her youngest daughter, Ellie—her “golden child”—but one day Ellie, this teenage daughter, just vanished. She didn’t come home from school, completely unlike Ellie, and no trace of her could be found.
“Then She Was Gone.” Until some weeks later, Laurel and her husband got a call that Ellie’s body had been found. With the realization that Ellie was dead, Laurel completely lost her moorings. She went through the motions of being a wife and a mother to their two other children, but ultimately the family fell apart. Ten years later the lonely middle-aged Laurel meets Floyd. She forms a friendship with him, and then a relationship, and she begins to find herself happy again. Floyd is a charming man with a precocious young daughter, Poppy, who unnervingly reminds Laurel, strongly, of her daughter Ellie. All the unanswered questions about Ellie’s disappearance resurface: had Ellie just been a teenage runaway or had something more sinister happened? And Laurel begins uncovering clues to unravel the mystery of Ellie’s disappearance. As the book cover says, it is “an acutely observed family drama with bone-chilling suspense.”
