Independent Reading Blog #1

Prompt 8: What indirect messages does this novel convey about love and relationships?

In “Then She was Gone,” Ellie Mack has been missing for over a decade, and her mother, Laurel, has not given up on her yet. Throughout the first part of the book, the chapters switch between the past and the present. As you read, you are able to piece together all the clues and make a prediction, while also understanding Laurel’s thinking ten years later. Losing a daughter can be an extremely heavy burden on a person, but Laurel kept looking for her even after the police told them she was most likely a runaway. The book conveys the idea that we should never give up on those who are worth fighting for. We specifically see this when the author writes “Laurel knew simultaneously that she was overreacting and also that she was not overreacting,” (page 14). This conveys the idea that when someone you love is missing, you can never care too much and you can never fight for them hard enough. Nothing is worse than undergoing the lose of a child, and Laurel had never given up on her within the ten years that she was missing. The book states that Laurel was a “glass-half-empty type of person,” (page 16) and then one day “her pride and joy had left the house and not come back,” (page 18). When you lose someone who means that much to you, you can begin to lose sight of yourself in trying to get them back. Ellie seemed to be the cause of happiness in Laurel’s life, and now that Ellie was gone her happiness went with it. Although the book conveys the message of never giving up on the ones you love, it also conveys the opposite. The author writes “the children meanwhile were shuffling along, like trains on a track, keeping to schedule. Hanna took her A levels. Jake graduated from university in the West Country where he’d been studying to be a chartered surveyor. And Paul was busy asking for promotions at work, buying himself new suits, talking about upgrading the car, showing her hotels and resorts on the Internet that had special deals that summer,” (page 34). This indirectly implies that although we care for those that we have lost, it is important to move on with our lives and leave the past in the past. We are all impacted differently in a situation like that, but it is necessary to have some type of routine in our lives so that we don’t go crazy. By having some type of normalcy we are able to move on with our lives and overcome all the pain.