Then She Was Gone: Book Review

Then She Was Gone by Lisa Jewell (Book Review) 

*Warning: This review contains spoilers*

I was a bit skeptical going into this book because thrillers are pretty hit or miss for me. I generally prefer my stories to be character driven, and often I find thrillers to be more plot driven (understandably so, usually). In the case of Then She Was Gone, that’s wasn’t really an issue at all!

My absolute favorite thing about this novel had nothing to do with the plot or figuring out who the killer was—it was Laurel as the protagonist. There are so many things to applaud about her as a main character. First of all, not many books feature older women as protagonists, so there aren’t a lot of well known stories out there about life for women past the age of twenty-five or thirty. Laurel is a middle-aged woman who has been married and divorced, has had children, and we spend a lot of the novel getting to watch her continue to live life—fall in love again, re-establish her sex life, redefine her relationship with her now adult son and daughter after the death of her other daughter during her teen years. Jewell handles her character arc so well—blending the grief of her daughter’s death that will never fully go away, to healing, and new beginnings for herself, and learning to connect with her surviving kids again after losing touch with them emotionally after Ellie’s disappearance. It’s all just written so well. It’s an amazing character arc and a great way of demonstrating how women’s lives don’t simply end after they’ve gotten married and had children. 

I did have a love/hate relationship with the way Laurel and her daughter Hanna’s relationship was handled. I do understand the general idea that Jewell was going for—the idea that losing one daughter had soured Laurel’s relationship with her other daughter, and there are so many reasons for that that are explored well. Like Laurel’s subconscious expectation that Hanna should be like her sister Ellie in Ellie’s absence and the pressure that puts on Hanna, plus the subconscious resentment of “why did it have to be Ellie?” Not to mention that Laurel wasn’t the only one grieving—a lot of the time to her it may have felt like she was the only one properly mourning Ellie’s loss, but Hanna was also mourning her sister. It may have looked different than Laurel’s grief as the mother, but it is grief nonetheless. 

None of that is the issue. All of that actually plays perfectly into Laurel’s character arc and feels genuine to the way a mother of multiple children might react when one of them disappears (and is eventually confirmed to be dead). But there are subtle implications throughout that Laurel never liked Hannah as much as Ellie, but there weren’t any specific details given as to why Ellie was favorited. Obviously, Laurel tends to glorify her when thinking of her in the past like she’s the perfect teenaged daughter—this makes sense, given the circumstance—but no specific details are given as to why Hanna was sidelined. There’s no indication that Hanna misbehaved, got into trouble, wasn’t good at school, or that her personality just clashed with her mother’s. They were never shown as quarreling in the flashback chapters. Laurel just didn’t like her for some reason, and as the reader, I was always just left wondering why exactly. 

There is one scene in particular during the flashback chapters between Laurel and Hanna that I thought was particularly well written. The night before Ellie went missing, she had asked her mother if she could have the last of some leftover lasagna for dinner. Later on, after it becomes clear to Laurel that Ellie has not come home for the night and she decides to report her missing, she’s forgotten to make any dinner. Hanna comes down into the kitchen looking for something to eat, and before she can eat the leftover lasagna herself, Laurel yanks it out of her hands and tells her she can’t eat that. It’s such a simple little scene, but very visceral and adds such an extra layer of emotion. Because it seems, at first, cruel that she would just rip the food out of Hanna’s hands and tell her she can’t eat it, because Hanna doesn’t know that it was what Ellie wanted to eat for dinner after all. But Laurel knew she was supposed to be saving the last piece for Ellie, and even though she’s already reported Ellie missing and her other kids haven’t eaten, it’s like she’s still keeping that promise to save it for Ellie. It’s a subtle but effective and realistic way of showing that Laurel still doesn’t believe Ellie is missing. She’s still subconsciously waiting for her to come home that night. It’s layered with this being the moment that Laurel has almost an intrusive thought—that Hanna should have been the one to go missing and not Ellie, then she immediately feels guilty for having thought it, no matter how uncontrollable the thought had been. This is such intense characterization, the idea that Laurel has such a strong implicit bias towards one of her daughters over the other that she might actually have had a subconscious preference for which one she would have wanted to go missing. This could have been even more intense than it was if only Jewell had explored more depth as to why Hanna was the least favorite in the first place. 

I did enjoy the very ending, the final chapter, where we see Hanna’s wedding, and Laurel watching proudly. She even calls Hanna her golden girl, which was a token of affection she once only bestowed on Ellie. It is a great arc, just to see where these two end up, and how they repair their mother-daughter relationship. I just wish there was a stronger foundation to the root cause of it, something more than just Ellie’s death. I needed to know why Hanna was always the least favorite. 

There are other really good things about this book. I liked Laurel’s ex-husband a lot and the way their dynamic functioned as a divorced couple who still have care and respect for one another, who share the weight of this loss of their child. I also loved the dual perspective timeline. Sometimes dual timelines can be fumbled when the author doesn’t know how to handle them properly, or they might just feel unnecessary overall, but the dual timeline in this story helped the plot and Jewell works with it very well. 

I am generally dissatisfied with the lack of real red herrings in the mystery aspect of the story. In the early chapters, from Ellie’s perspective, it’s described as being a series of twists and turns that lead her to abduction and that the first twist was her decision to get a math tutor—Noelle. But then all throughout the novel, Jewell never really introduces any other twists, any other real candidates for being Ellie’s kidnapper and killer. It was Noelle, so there weren’t any actual twists and turns the way it was described. It was straightforward. The series of twists and turns that Ellie’s narration describes is that she got a math tutor, and her math tutor abducted her. That’s two twists, not even enough to make a full turn. It’s fine if it was always intended for Noel to turn out to be the killer in the end, but Jewell never once strays from the Noelle path. The only reason that I, as the reader, ever thought it wasn’t Noelle was because I honestly thought it was too obvious, that another twist was going to come and reveal it was someone else. 

I guess technically Laurel’s new boyfriend Floyd (also former lover of Noelle) is kind of a red herring, but also not. He is a red herring in the sense that he did not kill Ellie and were made to suspect he might have, but also he’s not a red herring because he was involved with Noelle, murdered Noelle, and was harboring Poppy—the child that Ellie had during captivity. But as far as actual red herrings—characters who are framed as suspects in the narrative, only to be proven innocent later in some plot twist—this book is strangely devoid of them, despite how many candidates there were. With so many side characters—Floyd’s daughter SJ or Laurel’s son’s girlfriend—who don’t relatively play much of a role, Jewell easily could have made them into red herrings just to add suspense and throw readers off the Noelle track. Also, there’s an entire subplot about how Hanna fell in love with Ellie’s old high school boyfriend, and it horrifies Laurel when she finds this out. Easily, there could have been a red herring where Laurel is convinced Hanna and/or her boyfriend might have gotten rid of Ellie to be together. The paranoia could have fueled the subplot about Laurel and Hanna’s strained relationship. But alas… no. Noelle and Floyd are the first, last, and only implicated characters the whole story. 

It is kind of a shame how Floyd’s story ended. I get it; it’s a thriller, so it was kind of expected that he was either involved with what happened to Ellie or something else shady. But it’s a shame because of how well his relationship with Laurel was developed. It really was amazing to see a story about a divorced, middle-aged woman who already has kids getting a chance to fall in love again. I really wanted it to turn out that Floyd was innocent and normal, and that it was just some residual trauma from losing Ellie or guilt over moving on with her life after her daughter’s death that convinced Laurel otherwise, and in the end she would accept new love in her life. But alas…

There’s also the thing that’s really bugging me about Noelle. So… I really felt like so much of Laurel’s character development was such amazing representation of a female character, especially for an older woman—her thoughts and feelings and development. It was all done so well, but it all kind of ends up feeling disingenuous when you really consider the utter misogyny of Noelle’s character. 

I’m not against having female villains in thrillers. Women can be killers too. I only ask that their villain “origins” or their motivations be genuine, have as much depth as would be given to a male villain, and I just don’t think Jewell did that. Here’s a list of reasons why Noelle turned out to become a bad guy as presented by the context of the story: 

1. Being a virgin when she met Floyd and being insecure in her sexuality. 

2. Being afraid of losing Floyd because he was going to break up with her.

3. Trying to trap Floyd into staying with her by getting pregnant. 

4. Realizing that she had fertility issues and couldn’t get pregnant. 

YAWNNNNN

Seriously, when are we going to stop defining female characters (and real life women too!) by their sex lives, their motherhood, and their relationships with men. There is so much more to a woman than her sexuality and fertility. There’s so much more to life, to a woman’s life. I’m not saying that such a thing could never happen in real life, but it does feel a little far fetched that these were the baseline motivations that Noelle had for abducting a literal child, holding her hostage, artificially inseminating her, stealing her baby, and letting her die. Like? All because she couldn’t get pregnant with a dude who didn’t want to date her anyway? Girl, just find a new guy, consider undergoing artificial insemination yourself if you struggle to conceive naturally, or have you ever heard of adoption? Like, Jewell really isn’t going to explore any other deeper traumas going on with Noelle to actually delve into the psychology of someone like her? We’re really going to chalk it all up to getting dumped and not getting pregnant? 

I probably don’t need to explain why having infertility as a woman’s “villain origin story” is extremely harmful. We all remember Avengers Age of Ultron. But I will point out a few facts:

1. Infertility isn’t just a woman’s issue. It can affect anyone of any gender.

2. It doesn’t make you crazy. It might be emotionally traumatic to struggle with fertility if trying to get pregnant, but it will not turn you into a sociopath. 

So, yeah, it’s a pretty gross, anti-feminist exploration of why a woman would become like Noelle, and it’s pretty lazy, in my opinion. Given how well Jewell handled Laurel, I was kind of surprised by how she handled Noelle and expected more. 

The whole artificial insemination aspect of the story is pretty unrealistic too, and the revelation that Poppy is Ellie’s child. So is the foreshadowing. There’s literally a part of the story where Poppy describes her love of reading in a similar way that Ellie used to, which tips Laurel’s radar, and it actually made me roll my eyes because a love of reading cannot be genetically inherited. It could be passed down through bonding if the parent shared that experience with their child growing up, but Noelle purposely kept Ellie and Poppy separated while Ellie was still alive. So, no, she didn’t pass down the experience of reading to her daughter. I guess we just have to assume it’s genetic :) Also, is the whole artificial insemination thing a trope in crime thrillers? I seem to recall this being the exact moment that Gone Girl also lost me. If it is a trope, I don’t like it very much. I don’t know why, I guess I just prefer thrillers (since there’s no fantasy or sci-fi elements) to stay as grounded in reality as they can. If there’s a crime, don’t force me to suspend my disbelief. The emotional impact of the thriller will hit harder and be more psychologically frightening if I feel like it could happen in real life. 

Ellie’s actual death scene was pretty anticlimactic, but that may have been intentional as a writing choice because of the fact that we knew she was going to die ahead of time. I also appreciate that Jewell did not write it in excruciating detail; it would have been gratuitous. What’s happening is horrible enough, there doesn’t need to be torture porn, so I’m glad she side-stepped writing it that way.

Final Thoughts

Overall, I’d give Then She Was Gone 3 stars out of 5. It’s a mixed bag. There was so much in the beginning and middle that I loved, but the actual ending fell apart a bit for me.