I mentioned this novel, Then She Was Gone by Lisa Jewell, on my blog recently that I had picked it up for around $8 on a late-night Amazon impulse buy. I definitely don’t regret it. I read this book in two days. On the first day I read through the first 13 chapters and on the second day, I found myself reading into the wee hours of the morning to finish it. At around 2 am, when I finally closed the book, I had a lot of thoughts about it and I was tempted to sit down and write my review then – but I had some self-control, so I’m writing in the bleary morning hours of the next day.
Description (From Amazon):
Fifteen-year-old Ellie Mack was the perfect daughter. She was beloved by her parents, friends, and teachers. She and her boyfriend made a teenage golden couple. She was days away from an idyllic summer vacation, with her whole life ahead of her. And then she was gone.
Now her mother, Laurel Mack, is trying to put her life back together. It’s been 10 years since her daughter disappeared, seven years since her marriage ended, and only months since the last clue in Ellie’s case was unearthed. So when she meets an unexpectedly charming man in a cafe, she is surprised at how quickly their flirtation develops into something deeper. Before she knows it, she’s meeting Floyd’s daughters – and his youngest, Poppy, takes her breath away. Looking at her is like looking at Ellie. And now the unanswered questions she has tried so hard to put to rest haunt her anew…as well as some new ones about Floyd and Poppy….
My Thoughts on Then She Was Gone
That first paragraph of the description struck me as similar to my novel, The Disappearance of Susannah Dane, the “golden” child – gone, seemingly without a trace. That is, of course, where the similarities end. This book has enchanting descriptions. I don’t know if it’s because they are English, so the setting and some of the phrases are kind of novel to me as an American. But I really enjoyed the way that the author describes people, towns, and emotions, and the way that she leaves you wondering at the end of the chapter so you must read the next one. I love her writing style and I will definitely read a novel from Lisa Jewell again.
From here on out, there will be spoilers. Please add your thoughts in the comments!
The Characters
Laurel Mack: narcissist or mother in need of redemption?
Many chapters are written from Laurel’s perspective. The book follows her ten years after her daughter’s disappearance and early in the novel, we learn that they found Ellie’s body. This gives Laurel some closure and she starts to move on from her life. In the years after the disappearance, we learn that Laurel dismembered her life. Her husband left her, she was unable to form a bond with her two living children, and she keeps only enough items around to survive. She has no joy in her life. I think we can forgive her for all of this, since losing a child is certainly the worst thing that I can imagine.
However, Laurel also often has intrusive thoughts about how her living daughter, Hanna, should have been the one to disappear. She constantly compares Hanna to Ellie and judges her for her failures. Hanna seems to put up with her mom, but doesn’t have much of a relationship with her – nor does she want her to know about her personal life. She pays her mom to clean her apartment, probably as a way to stay connected when the typical mother-daughter relationship has been so brutally torn apart. But Laurel uses this opportunity to constantly snoop around Hanna’s life. The way she treats Hanna is wholly unacceptable, but at the end of the story (spoiler) she does come to realize this and apologizes to Hanna. She stops allowing herself to view her as leftovers- the daughter she must settle for. But the circumstances that must take place in order to reach this place are so…. unbelievable? Extreme? Heart-wrenching?
Ellie Mack: the girl who is taken.
We also read from Ellie’s perspective. In fact, early on in the story, we learn that Ellie was seeing a tutor who was inappropriate with her. The woman would shower her with gifts, compliments, and divulge details about her personal life to Ellie in a way that made her feel uncomfortable. And we learn that Ellie is last seen at this tutor’s house. I was surprised at how much Jewell brought us in on these details (and so early in the book), but I think it is because the real mystery is not who took her but why and ultimately, how did she end up dead?
Ellie’s character bothers me a little bit. She is the perfect child compared to her mom, but also admits to competing with Hanna for her mom’s attention (which seems unnecessary since Laurel never liked Hanna much anyway). She follows her tutor into her home and is drugged there. She never leaves again.
She is smart and realizes that she begins to suffer from Stockholm Syndrome. She tries to break out on a few occasions, unsuccessfully. But she also writes a note in a book that later ends up donated – so the letter can be found, of course, and says that she doesn’t hold anything against her family and not to worry about her. This note just seems so unbelievable to me – I think it helps wrap up the book a little too perfectly in the end. There’s this sense of “everything should be great – even though Ellie is dead forever and obviously suffered horribly for over a year in a damp basement just miles from her home…” and I think the author wanted to console readers on this a little bit. But I didn’t find comfort in the letter. Ultimately, it is almost worse that Ellie accepted her fate and the end and gave up on anyone trying to find her. So, even if she was okay with it, I definitely was not.
Noelle Donnelly: something is off about this one.
From the beginning, the tutor in the story comes off as odd. Everyone constantly talks about how bad she smells, how she cranes her neck, how her uncomfortable demeanor makes everyone else uncomfortable. Noelle Donnelly is one of the last people to see Ellie alive, but because the police dismissed Ellie’s case as a runaway, Noelle is not even questioned. Despite her living right across the street from the last place anyone ever saw Ellie, she was never a suspect.
Her character is odd – she is a brilliant maths tutor from a huge Irish family, but she never has connected to anyone. Her family all but cut her out after she moved to London. The loss of her own sister, early in her life, is credited as the reason that Noelle is so standoffish and strange. Noelle becomes obsessed with this author, a man who writes about math and starts sleeping with him. He never seems very interested in her but is interested enough to accidentally get her pregnant twice, though she miscarries both times. When she kidnaps Ellie, we aren’t sure what her intentions are with her. But we know they can’t be good.
From Ellie’s perspective, we see that Noelle often has dramatic mood swings when visiting her in the dark, basement room. Noelle’s character is believable to me up until the very last part of the book. She is obsessive and compulsive, often making strange decisions without thinking them through. She is a loner and has kept to herself most of her life. She drugs Ellie when it is convenient too. She’s intelligent. And that’s why Ellie’s death starts to make less sense to me.
According to Noelle, Ellie’s death is an accident. In an attempt to baby-trap the handsome author (named Floyd), she gets Ellie pregnant by purchasing sperm online and impregnating her while she sleeps. During the pregnancy, Noelle waffles between showering Ellie with gifts for the baby and screaming at her/regretting her decision. She is pretending to be pregnant the whole time and telling Floyd that this is his baby. Around 8 months into the pregnancy, Floyd breaks up with her, and Noelle’s interest in the baby wanes considerably.
Ellie is forced to have the baby in the basement without medical care. She gets an infection and later, gets mastitis. And that is how she dies – from a benign infection that Noelle probably could have faked well enough to secure a prescription. Why didn’t she? Because she had lost interest in Ellie.
And that makes zero sense. I guess at this point, she realizes her plan is falling apart and she seems pretty relieved that Ellie is dead in her basement. She just leaves her there. And the 20-odd hamsters that she had in the basement die along with Ellie because she just closes the door and doesn’t return. The smell is so bad that the neighbors even report her for this, but there’s still no investigation – despite poor Ellie dying only a year after her kidnapping.
So, this part bothers me a lot. Obviously, Noelle has mental health issues but something so simple as a mastitis infection could have been cured without too much trouble and Noelle has faked medical problems to get medicine for Ellie before. Why not then?
At the time of Ellie’s death, her baby is around 5 months old. And then Noelle starts bringing her to Floyd to show her. Why didn’t she show her earlier? Why didn’t she try to capitalize on this event that she had orchestrated before Ellie’s death? It’s odd to me.
Floyd and Poppy: two peas in a very odd pod.
When Laurel decides to move on from her daughter’s death, she happens to meet a man named Floyd in a local cafe and the two hit it off. They fall in love. He has two children, a daughter who is around 21 and Poppy, a nine-year-old. He claims that Poppy’s mother simply left her on his doorstep when she was about 4 years old and disappeared.
Laurel digs into this, slowly unraveling a very weird tale, and discovers that Poppy’s mother was Noelle (or so she thinks.) She remembers that Noelle was Ellie’s tutor. She even visits Noelle’s old home where the current owners let her inspect the house and she finds the basement where Ellie lived in captivity. She finds Ellie’s signature watermelon chapstick in the room.
Everyone in the story mentions how Poppy seems so much like Ellie. They look alike and say similar things. They are both smart and Laurel often feels like she’s pulled back in time when she is around her. But she also feels like the relationship that Poppy has with her dad is odd. He treats her like a grownup, lets her drink alcohol, lets her stay up late, and homeschools her. It is odd – the whole thing. But she keeps sleeping with this guy anyway…
We learn that Floyd and Noelle had a falling out because she was a bad mom to Poppy. She left her home alone as a toddler and let her get hurt. She let her have anything she wanted just to avoid spending time with her. And Floyd tried to call her out on the behavior. He demanded custody and suggested that Noelle should only have visitation.
This scene is sort of out of character for Noelle. She flies into a rage and despite planning to run away with Poppy, she tells him to keep her and admits that she is neither of their genetic child. She admits that her mother was named Ellie and that her father was a turkey baster. And Floyd… kills her?
Yes, he strangles her to death and hides her body in their deep freezer for FIVE YEARS. Whaaat?
Then just before he meets Laurel, he buries the body in his back garden and then seeks out Laurel, Poppy’s grandmother (though she doesn’t know it.)
As a side note- he made the connection between the Ellie who was missing a decade prior and the Ellie that was Poppy’s mother through a true crime episode on television and the striking resemblance between Ellie and Poppy confirms it for him, though he never did a DNA test. So, he seeks out Poppy’s grandma and starts a relationship with her.
Then, conveniently, decides to tell Laurel everything and kills himself.
The “Perfect” Ending
This is where the ending lost all sense of reality for me. Laurel ends up becoming a mother to Poppy, Hanna is overjoyed and loves her, her ex-husband and his new wife have a great relationship, Hanna marries Ellie’s high school boyfriend, and the family seems all together and happy. And this is when Laurel decides to finally deal with her issues about Hanna (and the dreadful reality that her least favorite child is the one that survived) … Noelle and Floyd, Poppy’s legal parents, are happily out of the picture, and wouldn’t you know that Floyd left them enough money that they won’t ever have to struggle?
It’s too perfect. Laurel gets everything she could ever want – including a do-over child. She seems to not blame Floyd for killing Noelle, even though when he kills her, he had no idea the kind of person she was. As far as he knew, she was just a disinterested and irresponsible mom. He had no idea about the kidnapping, the abuse, or any of it. He just murdered a person and kept the body in his house for half a decade. Forgivable, right? Laurel and Poppy even share a moment where they lament that he “didn’t have to die,” just because of the things he had done.
Poppy, the world’s most tragic child, has effectively lived all of her earliest 9 years with BODIES IN HER HOMES. First her biological mother, then her “adoptive” mother! Noelle didn’t get rid of her body until years later and neither did Floyd. Why are these people so keen to hold onto actual bodies in their homes (with a child in it?)
And wouldn’t you know that Poppy barely notices that she is without her dad? She simply blends right into the family like she always lived there with zero issues with attachment, abandonment, or behavior. Just miraculously becomes the perfect child… just like Ellie was.
I almost wish that the author had extended it. Tell us about Floyd fighting for custody of Poppy. Let someone be convicted of murder in this book. Let us get into the nitty-gritty of what it looks like when a child loses a parent. The author tackles big issues and complicated emotions earlier in the book, so why not make the ending a little messy?
This is my longest book review in a long time, so I think that says enough. Perfectly wrapped up ending or not, this book was fantastic. I really enjoyed it. I loved the swaps between perspectives, I found the characters to be complicated and unpredictable. I liked the premise and I can certainly live with the ending as it is. But in my imagination, Poppy is going to a lot of therapy after all of that.
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