Review : Elizabeth is Missing by Emma Healey
Elizabeth is Missing by Emma Healey
Pages : 320
Genre : Fiction
Stand alone
My Rating : 4/5
About the Book :
Maud is forgetful. She makes a cup of tea and doesn’t remember to drink it. She goes to the shops and forgets why she went. Sometimes her home is unrecognizable–or her daughter Helen seems a total stranger.
But there’s one thing Maud is sure of: her friend Elizabeth is missing. The note in her pocket tells her so. And no matter who tells her to stop going on about it, to leave it alone, to shut up, Maud will get to the bottom of it.
Because somewhere in Maud’s damaged mind lies the answer to an unsolved seventy-year-old mystery. One everyone has forgotten about.
Everyone, except Maud . . .
My Thoughts :
What a depressing book!
It was, really, the opposite of a feel-good book. But, “good” isn’t the only thing worth feeling, and Elizabeth is Missing really was worth reading.
I simply wasn’t prepared for it. Despite having read reviews, I expected a thriller/mystery with an interesting and unreliable narrator; instead, Elizabeth is Missing is more of a literary fiction wrapped in a mystery. Not a bad thing in itself, just not what I was expecting!
And I loved it, I really did. I am completely impressed with Emma Healey’s talent. She made me feel like I was in Maud’s head. Maud prepares tea in a paragraph, then finds it in the next and wonders who left it there; she calls a man to question him about Elizabeth, then asks him why is he calling her once he answers the phone. It was sad, it was scary, it was at times even a bit humorous; it was brilliant. Emma Healey wrote Maud with compassion, with respect, and she developed her into a complex character I loved and cared for, too.
I’d been afraid that Maud’s dementia would be tiring after a few chapters, but I found it to be the most interesting part of the story – more than the mystery of Elizabeth, and more than the mystery of Maud’s past. Her state gets worse as the story progresses (a change subtle but again, perfectly written), yet she clings to the mystery of Elizabeth until the very end.
Elizabeth is Missing isn’t a book I would recommend to everyone, but I would still strongly recommend it to those who are curious about it. I found it emotionally draining, heartbreaking, yet captivating and completely worth it.
This does sound devastating. We have a friend who is struggling with dementia so this might hit home for me.