the characters are so flat and transparent
How much character do the characters have?
It's been a long time since I read a book that falls so squarely into the adult-psychological-thriller category, and to be honest, I doubted whether I could really enjoy it. I often find that books in these categories are either a) completely unbelievable and I get eye strain from rolling my eyes so often, or b) the characters are so flat and transparent that I really don't give a fig about what happens to them.In Gone Girl, however, Gillian Flynn has created a story that is both believable but also stretched my imagination as a reader and characters that although definitely not in the likeable category were anything but flat.The story smacks of tension right from the beginning, and as the story progresses I found myself more and more drawn into the world of Nick and Amy and wanting to know more about them - their families, their relationship, their whole history together and how it related to what was happening in the current day.Gone Girl has some really good points for more thought too - were Amy's parents' overbearing and more than slightly over-protective nature so damaging on her psyche, or was she simply born the way she was, hard-wired into her brains? Was Nick's upbringing and his father part of the reason he felt it so difficult to connect with and empathise with his wife? Do we ever really know the person we are partnered with, or do they have a side that we never really see? Such questions are what makes this book a true psychological thriller, and so very hard to predict exactly what will happen next.My only criticism, and it's not even that, it's more a warning to other people that need to like at least one main character is that I found none of the main characters particularly likeable at all, with perhaps the exception of Nick's sister Go, who with her unique personality and sarcastic, dirty sense I felt quite an affinity with and I do wish she had played more of a part in the story. But for the most part, Nick, Amy, their parents and friends are either quite self-centred, arrogant people or they don't play a big enough role to really have an impact.And the million dollar question - the ending? I anticipated it because I wanted to know what happened, yet dreading it because I was really enjoying the twists and turns of the story, but in the end I can say I was pretty satisfied as a whole. It didn't feel rushed, contrived or unbelievable, and that's a true testament to the way that Gillian Flynn writes. 