Good as Gone by Amy Gentry

I really don't usually read this much suspense, but I seem to be in a bit of a streak. Good as Gone by Amy Gentry is the book club selection for this month and I admit it wasn't the option for which I cast my vote. The premise seemed like it might be difficult to read and a little like another book I had read, Emma in the Night, but rules are rules so I borrowed it from the library and got to reading.

Julie and Jane are sisters and still little girls when Julie, at age thirteen, is taken from their home in the middle of the night. Jane, ten at the time, is frozen with fear as she witnesses a man with a knife taking away her sister. Eight years later, with an innocuous ring of the doorbell, Julie arrives on the front steps of that same home, but something just doesn't seem right. Is this really Julie? If it is, where has she been all this time?

This book was so engrossing that I read the first half in one sitting. I could have finished it all at once, but real life got in the way. The story moves quickly, flashing from one point of view to another, allowing the reader two very different perspectives of the same story. Anna, Julie's mother struggles mightily with her loss and with the reunion with her daughter:

This woman is older than twenty-one. I am not as old as she is, and I am forty-six, with lines of mourning etched all over my face that will never go away.

Good as Gone also explores the family dynamics that drastically change when a child has gone missing or dies. Jane and her mother have a terrible time relating to one another; Anna and her husband, Tom, fall apart despite staying together; and Anna is doing all she can just to keep moving from one day to another. She hopes she will continue to receive credit for...

...the not-insubstantial difficulty I have getting gout of bed every morning to face a world where the worst thing has already happened and somehow I'm still alive. 

I stayed up way past my bedtime finishing this book because there was no way I could sleep until I had all the answers. The ending did seem to drag a bit with possibly more information and description than was absolutely necessary, but that may just have been my perspective as I was trying to rush through it. 

This book does require a bit of courage to read since it deals with such awful crimes against children, but I thought it was really good. What happens is awful, but the actual description in the book isn't overly obtrusive. Give it a shot and tell me what you think.