Told through various perspectives traveling back and forth across ten years, Then She Was Gone, by Lisa Jewell, focuses on Laurel Mack, mother of the missing Ellie. Found ten years after her disappearance, Ellie’s body is finally put to rest and Laurel begins to move on, only to meet Floyd and his daughter Poppy. As Laurel's relationship with Floyd blossoms, she begins to learn strange things about Poppy, Ellie, and the threads that connect them all. As Laurel learns more about the new people in her life, the reader travels back in time to hear the truth through Ellie, Floyd, and Ellie’s kidnapper.
There are a lot of things to like about this book. The use of multiple perspectives across time is incredibly compelling and creates a dynamic storytelling experience. Something I noticed, which I quite enjoyed, was the fact that Ellie’s and Laurel’s narrative is told exclusively in the third person while Floyd and Noelle have moments of first person narration. This detail is essential to the story because a key element of the book is built right into its very structure. Ellie and Laurel have no control over their story, others have taken their lives and rewritten their story completely and so they are unable to use the “I”. Their stories are told in the third person because they aren’t the ones able to tell their story. Noelle and Floyd, on the other hand, are delivered to us in the first person because they are the ones in control and making it up as they go along. They have the power, influence, and control over the story, which is conveyed through their ability to say “I” in the narrative. Meanwhile, the reader can only be told what has happened to Ellie and Laurel, they cannot tell it themselves because they don’t have control over the story.
Noelle is a very interesting and unsettling character. She speaks with such clarity that it is difficult to associate such an evil mind with such a well-spoken character. When she first kidnaps Ellie is especially unnerving because she speaks very excitedly and optimistically, giving Ellie gifts and acting very cheerful and enthusiastic throughout the whole ordeal. It’s also interesting to see the deliberate distancing she does between her and Ellie by almost never referring to Ellie by name. She almost exclusively calls her “the girl”.
I would have liked for the story to spend more time on its ending, as everything wrapped up pretty quickly. The relationship between Laurel and Hanna, her other daughter, is established almost immediately with Laurel’s thought at the beginning of the book: “it should be you missing and Ellie eating beans on toast”. Following this, the two suffer through ten years of near-estrangement only to suddenly reconcile everything with seemingly a single phone call. After the events of Ellie’s disappearance and everyone’s role in it is revealed, Poppy goes to live with Laurel and is perfectly happy and well-adjusted in spite of her entire life and identity being completely uprooted. I think the ending would have been more satisfying if things didn’t seem so black and white. While the bulk of the work is over, the characters still have a lot to deal with and though the reader won’t be there to witness it, I think it’s important to acknowledge that there is still more for them in store.
Overall, Lisa Jewell’s Then She Was Gone is a suspenseful novel that gives the reader an intimate look into the lives and thoughts of all its key players. It’s an excellent read for those who enjoy Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl or Megan Miranda’s All the Missing Girls.