Missing Pieces by Heather Gudenkauf

Missing Pieces by Heather Gudenkauf

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Traveling Sisters Group Read Review by Brenda, Norma, Lindsay, Kaceey, JanB, Linda (Sisters Mom) and Holly

We love how everyone experiences the same book in such differing ways and we really value each other’s opinions.  So with that being said this gets 5 Stars for this sister reading experience!

So we were split on our feelings and ratings on this one for some of us we rate 3.5 to 4 stars for others it gets a rating of 2 to 2.5 stars.  So for the purpose of this review we have a combined rating of 3 stars!

We really enjoyed gathering the missing pieces from this story with our group of sisters and wow were we ever split on our feelings towards this one.  It made for some fun laugh out loud moments and interesting “book talk” among us.  A term from Holly that we will now be using as a sister term.  This book also inspired another new sister term and we also gave a title to Lindsay the “believability police.”  We sure had the believability police out on full force while we were reading this one.  Striking up quite the conservation for us.

HEATHER GUDENKAUF has taken a different direction here with her who dunnit plotline with MISSING PIECES from her usual stories that centre around children and family dynamics.  It still had a lot of family dynamics to it which kept the conversation going and had some of us questioning the believability to the story.

The story was told from our main characters point of view Sarah who swings from a quiet supportive wife to a suspicious one with many thoughts and questions sparking quite the conversation with us.  We follow along with Sarah as she tells us the story and we gather clues by her thoughts through the many questions she asks herself.  This became repetitive and unnecessary for some of us and just didn’t work for them. For others it did work and appreciated the lightness of being told instead of being showed and it was a nice break from some of the heavier thrillers that they have read.

All of our suspicions were all over the place with this one as the mystery shifted a few times. Kaceey had us laughing out loud with her comment my radar is pointing in — direction (today anyway). In the end we pretty much suspected everyone with a few of us picking out the suspect quite early on.

For some of us the setting to MISSING PIECES stood out and the creepy old house was like a character and added to the atmosphere of the story for them, giving them an ominous feel.  For others it brought nothing to the story.

Of course the ending had us split with some rushing through it just to get it done, some disappointed, and for others they were completely satisfied.  So if you are looking for a quick and easy read with no real guess work and lots of questions we would recommend this book to you!