Oh, darn… this is yet another print-on-demand book from bookshop.org. Are they mostly a frontend for Ingram Lightning Source these days? It’s not that these POD books are horrible — they’re reasonably well printed — but they just have the wrong feel in the hands. Kinda too floppy? At least this one doesn’t have that awful phthalate “soft touch” slop on the covers… That stuff always gives me the ick.
Anyway, if I’d known, I’d have bought a used copy from biblio.com instead.
This is a very high concept book — it’s about a woman with dementia who is looking for her missing friend, Elizabeth. So she forgets what she’s doing all the time… so it’s like a more frustrating version of Memento, kinda?
It’s not quite as frustrating as you’d think, because half the book is spent in memories of the past, and there’s a missing person there, too, but at least the protagonist in the past isn’t an amnesiac. But she’s a frustrating person as a child, too — and that just feels off.
The book seems to be written from a position of great frustration, really. Did the author work in a nursing home or something? Especially the way (oops spoilers!) the daughter became the hero at the end feels very… Mary Sue-ish?
I think the book is pretty good? But it really didn’t need to be as long as it is. While there’s some entertaining twists, the solution to at least one of the mysteries seemed pretty clear from about one third in, so that was just… frustrating. Healey’s main impulse when writing any scene seems to be to withhold information so that it can be sprung on the reader later, and that’s just lazy.
It’s very method, this book — frustrating all the way through.
The book was a “Nominee for Readers’ Favorite Debut Goodreads Author (2014)”, so it’s well-liked, but reading the upvoted reviews, the refrain seems to be that word again and again:
Elizabeth Is Missing (2014) by Emma Healey (buy new, buy used, 3.71 on Goodreads)