Good Half Gone by Tarryn Fisher

Iris Walsh saw her twin sister, Piper, get kidnapped—so why does no one believe her?

Iris narrowly escaped her pretty, popular twin sister’s fate as a teen: kidnapped, trafficked and long gone before the cops agreed to investigate. With no evidence to go on but a few scattered memories, the case quickly goes cold.

Now an adult, Iris wants one thing—proof. And if the police still won’t help, she’ll just have to find it her own way; by interning at the isolated Shoal Island Hospital for the criminally insane, where secrets lurk in the shadows and are kept under lock and key. But Iris soon realizes that something even more sinister is simmering beneath the surface of the Shoal, and that the patients aren’t the only ones being observed…

Review

A solid thriller. Once again, can’t believe the general rating this has!

Dark and a rollercoaster of emotions, Good Half Gone is a rendition of familiar bond, a great look at sisterly love, and a great examination of what happens when one loses such a close loved one that you grow obsessed to find out what happened to them and what life looks like after such a loss.

Following what looks like a growing trend, we read chapters from the past and present from Iris’s eyes, and both are gut-wrenching. Twin sisters Iris and Piper had no idea what would happen when they accepted to go to the movies with some… “friends.” Both their lives are irrevocably changed when Piper gets abducted while on the date, and Iris can’t stop searching for answers and is ridden with guilt for having witnessed her sister being taken away in her presence. Convinced her sister was taken for trafficking, years later she seems to finally have found a ray of hope and takes a job at a psychiatric hospital, where she is certain she has a strong lead for who Piper’s kidnapper was.

There are so many themes in this book, and Fisher gives them their spotlight without making the book convoluted nor heavy; this is a heavy book, yes, but just emotionally so. The complex emotions that Iris go through are so raw and so well exposed, first person point of view was absolutely the best choice here, and I’m not just talking about her having witnessed Piper’s abduction, I mean about how she had such a difficult relationship with her sister prior to the incident, and how she still had to deal with her feelings of being “the bad half” out of the both. What also rang so true was the fact that police didn’t take Piper’s case seriously at all, in so many real life cases we see that a teenager disappearance’s are ruled out as run-aways from the very start and there’s no way on earth on changing polices mind, I though this was very well put out and gave good credence to the trope where the main character takes matters into their own hands and do their own investigation.

There was an aspect that was pretty unrealistic to me but it surprisingly didn’t affect my rating at all but I understand how it can impact on others perfectly. I do recommend the book a lot, with the fear of readers not liking the twists as I’ve seen other reviewers do, but I believe the topics Tarryn Fisher tackles still make the read quite worth it.

4 / 5!