Some of the characters feel slightly under developed as well which leads the reader to wonder why some characters are even part of the story. This lack of depth has the reader guessing pretty quickly what is going to happen as the story progresses. Then She Was Gone lacks themes that make the story feel very predictable and done before. Laurel also meets a love interest, Floyd Dunn, and allows herself to finally be happy after years and years of feeling the need to be constantly depressed. At the end of the novel the reader will learn about Hanna’s wedding and how each of the family members in the Mack family come together and finally feel like a family again after years of being torn apart. The reader will learn that he is really only part of the story to move the plot along.Īs the story progresses, Laurel slowly discovers how for so many years she wallowed in the disappearance of Ellie that she had basically forgotten about the relationships with her other children, and by the end of the novel she has rekindled a friendship with them all. There is also a third sibling, Jake, who is there but is a very forgettable character. She also damages her relationship with her other daughter, Hanna, because Laurel makes it clear that Ellie was her favourite and she admits that she wishes that it was Hanna that went missing all those years ago. Laurel grieves intensely to the point where she pushes her aloof husband away because they are grieving differently and Laurel believes that they need to continue to be sad and not move on with their lives. Laurel Mack, mother of three, wife, and caretaker is portrayed as a typical mother who has lost her daughter and doesn’t have any answers.

She shows how differently people experience grief and how that impacts the family dynamic in a way that can become catastrophic to the family unit. Jewell uses the disappearance of Ellie as a way to explore what happens to a family after a child goes missing and then not receiving answers for many years. She takes themes such as grief and family dynamics and incorporates them well with various characters that provide some depth to the plot and help move the story along.

Jewell manages to juggle each of the unique perspectives with different points-of-view while also bringing them together seamlessly to create a suspenseful storyline, but one that feels predicable.

Then She Was Gone is both a mystery and a domestic thriller that the author has broken up into five different parts with multiple narrators. Published in 2017, Lisa Jewell’s 15th novel Then She Was Gone follows the disappearance of fifteen-year-old Ellie Mack and her mother, Laurel Mack, as she learns to cope with life without her ‘Golden Girl’ and how it is okay to move on in life after a tragedy.

Then she was gone review