I received this book for free from Edelweiss in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.
Good as Gone by Amy Gentry
Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on July 26, 2016
Genres: Family Life, Mysteries, Suspense
Pages: 288
Format: Kindle
Source: Edelweiss
Four Stars

Thirteen-year-old Julie Whitaker was kidnapped from her bedroom in the middle of the night, witnessed only by her younger sister. Her family was shattered, but managed to stick together, hoping against hope that Julie is still alive. And then one night: the doorbell rings.

A young woman who appears to be Julie is finally, miraculously, home safe. The family is ecstatic—but Anna, Julie’s mother, has whispers of doubts.  She hates to face them. She cannot avoid them. When she is contacted by a former detective turned private eye, she begins a torturous search for the truth about the woman she desperately hopes is her daughter.

Good as Gone by Amy Gentry reminded me of one of those tragic kidnapping movies on Lifetime in the best of ways. A loving normal family torn apart by the kidnapping of oldest daughter Julie, when eight years later a women claiming to be her shows up at their door.

Everyone is thrilled to try to pieces the family back together, but mom Anna can’t fight the feeling that something just isn’t right and Jane, the younger sister who witnessed the kidnapping is slowly unraveling. With the help of a private investigator, the family must choose a scary path to the truth. The writing of Gentry was top-notch and I really felt with the characters. The surprise ending felt a bit rushed, but other that that, this was a read I very much enjoyed.

Favorite Lines – Something breaks off inside. It feels like a piece of my lungs, or like the water in the fountain is boiling and the skin is falling off my foot from the ankle down. That is all an exaggeration. What I should say is that it feels like all the parts of my body are going their separate ways.

It feels like I am being abandoned by everything that has ever felt like a part of me. Maybe once you’ve been left by the most important person in your life, you can never be unleft again. Maybe you’re destined to be abandoned even by your own guts, maybe your foot walks off with your thighbone, why not, stranger things have happened.