Book Review: Gone by Lisa McMann

Book: Gone
Author: Lisa McMann
Published: 2010
Source: purchased

Who I Told I’d Read It: the author, when I bought it at a book signing
Time: 0:51:38

Janie's on vacation, trying to escape the aftereffects of a traumatic police investigation and the news that her dream-catching abilities will eventually leave her blind and crippled. Even in the sun and sand, though, neither she nor her beloved Cabe can quite dismiss it from their minds.

Then Janie's dragged back home by the news that the father she never knew is comatose in a local hospital. To her surprise, he's been close all this time, living in a cabin in the woods, isolated from everyone and everything. Furthermore, it seems that he's the source of her dream-catching, but unlike the only other dream-catcher she's ever known, he is neither blind nor crippled. Janie slowly realizes his self-imposed isolation is the key to avoiding this terrible fate.

So now she must choose--be with Cabe, and become a burden to the person she loves most of all? Or spend the rest of her life whole and healthy, and utterly alone?

In order to not get totally lost in this book, you have to have read the first two. It took me some time to get mentally caught up, as I read the last one during last year's 48HBC. That aside, I think it's a worthy end to an absorbing and somewhat dark trilogy. We even managed to get a little bit of closure on the difficult alcoholic-mother/caretaker-daughter relationship.

(From here on in, there be spoilers. You've been warned.)

Janie's eleventh-hour realization of the true effects of her father's isolation was one I'd come to a long time before. For quite awhile, I really thought that isolation was going to be her choice, and I was all geared up to be mad about it, because the example of her father, comatose and crazy in the hospital, was right there in front of her.

Certainly the ending is not sunshine and puppies. The whole point of such a difficult choice is that neither outcome is particularly palatable. But Cabel and Janie's relationship has been set up as so sturdy and loving that you feel certain that if any couple can handle the fate that awaits them, they can.