Then She Was Gone

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This reading group guide for Then She Was Gone includes discussion questions and ideas for enhancing your book club. I don’t want to say more because part of the excitement of the book is discovering how the various plot lines intertwine and how the mysteries are resolved.

He makes mention about what a schlub he is and how incredible Laurel is just for giving him the time of day. Missing persons tropes are common in mysteries and thrillers, and the theme has been written and explored in many predictable ways, but also in many clever, even shocking ways.Hanna sighs, Laurel sighs too, realizing she has just done the thing she always promised herself she would never do. I think this book has one too many pieces to the puzzle trying to make it mysterious where I feel it would have been better to just focus on on one or two things. She lives in north London with her husband, two teenage daughters, one cat, one guinea pig and the best dog in the world. How can you distinguish between when you are being pessimistic, and when you should trust your intuition?

The amount of courage and character she showed during the challenging experiences will make us love her more. I'm afraid I have to disagree with one character telling that our decision-making capabilities aren't fully developed until we are twenty-five years old. What begins as a story about the mother of a missing girl starting a new relationship as she comes terms with her grief morphs into a gripping, disturbing and utterly fascinating tale about what really happened to young Ellie Mack. She wore gym gear and had her hair in a ponytail and usually had a small white dog with her that Theo would pick up and kiss on the cheek before placing it gently back down on the pavement; then he would kiss his mum and saunter through the gates. The fact that she was standing in her adult daughter’s kitchen picturing her dead in a ditch because she hadn't left a cereal bowl in the sink was perfectly sane and reasonable in the context of her own experience.

As soon as their relationship become serious and she forms true bounding with Poppy, she surprisingly finds out the birth mother Noelle of Poppy who left her is the same woman who has tutored her daughter Ellie. At the end of the book, the author mentions that her agent had an audacious and shocking idea for Then She Was Gone which the author championed. Lisa Jewell’s “Then She Was Gone” is a phenomenal psychological thriller that kept me enthralled throughout. During lunch, something to do with some homework assignment or other, and Ellie, who really knew nothing much about anything, knew immediately that he wasn’t gay and that he was talking to her because he liked her.