Review: Elizabeth Is Missing - Emma Healey

This book sounded really intriguing to me. It is about an old woman, whose memory is beginning to fade. She becomes convinced that her friend Elizabeth is missing, but she keeps forgetting things, so she is not sure how she is going to figure out where Elizabeth went. Alongside this story she thinks back to the 1940s, when she was a young girl and her sister Sukey went missing. These two  mysteries unfold together, until we finally learn the truth about them both.

I thought it was an interesting point of view to take. We experience the world through the eyes of a woman who is suffering from probably Alzheimer’s. I have to say though, it got a bit tiring in the end, because she goes over the same things again and again and sometimes she would start over on the same thing, as soon as she had resolved it, because she would have already forgotten it. It was interesting as far as seeing how the mind works in a person with that sort of illness, but it made for very slow plot development. 

When the narrator looked back on her childhood, the plot moved along a great deal faster and I found this story more interesting. Mostly because we were sure that Sukey was actually missing, as opposed to Elizabeth, who might have just gone to a retirement home, and the narrator forgot. 

I think the book was okay, I gave it 2,5 stars on Goodreads. I feel like it would have been better if some of the present-day narrative had been skipped. The ending also seemed rushed and construed, but it did explain everything.