Book Review of “Gone Girl” by Gillian Flynn.

This novel mirrors some aspects of a familiar tale: girl (Amy) meets boy (Nick), loses contact, reconnects, dates, and marry each other in their 30s. However, the timeline of the novel moves backwards from their 5^th anniversary to show the unravelling of their lives. They both lose their jobs as New York writers, move back to his hometown so he can care for his parents, she disappears and frames him for her murder, but she reappears and blames another man for her kidnapping. At the end of the novel, Amy continues to control his life by blackmailing him into staying married.

Amy is the only child to survive after multiple miscarriages and stillbirths. Her parents use her name and life experiences to create the title character of a very profitable book series. She resents her parents for both these situations and feels pressure to be perfect. Though her parents are child psychologists, ironically they do not see that she is mentally ill dating back to her teenage years. Nick is a Mama’s boy and has a close connection to his twin sister, but at times he thinks negatively, and admits he does, about women just like his verbally and emotionally abusive father.

Even though Nick’s voice opens the novel, Amy is the one in control. She is the active one and Nick just reacts to her. She is always intellectually miles ahead of him and that is his downfall.

Amy creates diary entries that are dated back in time to paint herself as an innocent wife who gradually begins to fear her husband. Her diary lays the groundwork for framing him for murder. Outside her diary entries however, Amy admits that for the first 2 years of their marriage, she presented herself as a wife whose greatest happiness was making her husband happy but she could not maintain that facade. Over time, she came to hate Nick for not realizing that she was putting on a front and for acting upset at having to listen to the real Amy. When she saw Nick with his mistress, she decided not to divorce him because that would make life too easy for him. Rather, she would punish him by disappearing and framing him for murder.

Nick tells the reader that he cannot deal with angry, tearful women just like his father. My question: why not? His mother was not the angry one in the marriage – it was her husband. Nick claimed that Amy made him a better man because she expected so much from him (intelligence, consideration, romance) but he could not keep it up so he resented her. Nick realized too late that he mistakenly blamed her completely but that he was partly to blame.

A few questions I would pose to Amy and Nick: did he ever see what was happening to Amy as time went on? Did he see what was happening to their relationship? By the end of the novel, it was obvious that Amy and Nick hated each other but I still wondered why they pretended they were different people when they met each other and dated?

Three characters did not seem to fit with the rest of the novel. Why would Amy befriend 2 people at the hotel where she stayed after disappearing, especially since she was carrying around thousands of dollars in cash? It seems out of character for her. Amy’s friend Desi as described seems gay. Maybe he is just more effeminate than what I expect of a guy who would seek out Amy. He does like to control her, though. Maybe I’m not allowing for a different kind of controlling heterosexual guy.

I am accustomed to reading novels which more gradually build-up to a disastrous ending. Initially, the timeline of the novel frustrated me but then I appreciated it as a creative approach to revealing the unspooling of both a marriage and the individuals.

During this Women’s History Month, instead of reviewing women who are already part of the known historical record, I want to focus on a female author who brings unrecognized women to life through her fascinating books of historical fiction: Marie Benedict. I have loved her writing style and choice of women since the first book I read of hers: “The Other Einstein”. I have also thoroughly enjoyed “The Personal Librarian”, “Her Hidden Genius”, “Lady Clementine”, and “The Only Woman in the Room”. To create her mesmerizing stories, Benedict uses original source material and then augments it with reliable secondary material to properly represent the historical background of her characters’ lives.

In these books, Benedict convincingly portrayed real women in science, technology, business, education, and politics, and the men in these fields. The women worked on projects in these fields that positively benefited society in their day, and today. Benedict deftly illustrated the societal forces that the women must have overcome, gone through, or gone under in order to survive and succeed. She also offered examples of possible internal monologues by these women as they struggled to decide how to deal with society’s expectations, and themselves. Yes, Benedict included male characters that trivialized, disrespected, and abused the women but she also showed men who supported, cheered on, and celebrated the women’s advancements and achievements. She did not confine herself to only American women, white women, or women from specific time periods.

In typical fashion when first reading about a woman of whom I have no knowledge, I asked myself “why have I never heard of her?” I learned about only one in school, but not till college: Rosalind Franklin of “Her Hidden Genius”. At that time in the 1980s, Franklin’s contribution in discovering DNA was minimized, with claims that she only took a picture of DNA in 1952 and did not verify what it represented. Years later, in a play at the University of Chicago, I saw her character depicted as refusing to claim her discovery prematurely, without continuous and exhausting proof. Perhaps she really did refuse. In my opinion, that made perfect sense in her time because women, and their work, were routinely dismissed (sometimes still are) unless discovered or verified by men.

Instead of feeling obligated to memorize dry facts about these women, I will more likely remember them through these rich stories. Stories might make it more interesting for children and teenagers to read about these women. Benedict's books can inspire readers to learn more about the real lives of her characters.

I cannot wait to read her latest historical novel “The Mitford Affair”!

In a graduate program about 20 years ago, I interviewed six undergraduate students attending one university about their reasons for choosing it. Specifically, I wanted to learn what factors students considered in their decision. Through my review of the literature at that time, I learned that college choice is influenced by factors which can be divided into two types: personal student characteristics and external influences.

For high school students, the external influences of friends, family, and high school personnel impacted their college choice. Students and parents might decide on a college based on their joint perception of the quality of an institution. For my interviewees, religion and parents’ education appeared related to college choice. College costs may affect the probability that a student will attend college and even a particular college. The student characteristic “socioeconomic status” interacted with the two external influences of institutional cost and financial aid.

An external influence outside of family and high school personnel is the economy. For example, when economic conditions produce fewer jobs for college graduates, potential students tend to favor institutions which focus on professional or vocational paths. As the job market improves for non-college graduates, they become increasingly less likely to return to school.

The student characteristic “ability” affected students’ application decisions. They may judge their chances for admission based on their high school achievements and then apply only to those institutions. Financial aid, an external influence, also interacted with ability:  those with high financial need and low ability were less likely to consider as many colleges as those students in the opposite situation. The higher the students’ aptitude, achievement, educational aspirations, family income, and parents’ education, the more likely they were to choose expensive, selective, private, and geographically distant four-year colleges and universities. In addition, race, sex, religion, personality, lifestyle, self-image, personal values, benefits sought, parents’ personalities, and environmental factors may also impact students’ college choice.

The institutional characteristics of location, academic programs, and institutional communications also affected a student’s college choice. Campus visits made quite an impression on my interviewees: for two of them, their visits helped them decide on that particular university. In general, students appeared more attracted to those institutions which offer a broad curriculum, close geographical location, more financial aid awards, and lower overall costs. In terms of their final choice of a college, students seemed most influenced by the institutional characteristics of cost, size, quality, programs, location, athletics, financial aid, social atmosphere, religious emphasis, and job availability. My interviewees had various reasons for choosing the particular post-secondary educational institution: cost, location, religious affiliation, reputation, campus, academic programs, financial aid, transfer option, small classes, and best friend attended the same school.

My interview included a question about the student’s use of the Internet during the search process. For the students I interviewed, their college choice appeared to have been partially determined by how they conducted the college search, if they had the knowledge and skills to perform a search, and if they felt limited by family constraints before beginning their search.

Since my research of about 20 years ago, external influences have expanded beyond the traditional word-of-mouth conversations among friends, families, and neighbors. Whitney Lehmann compared these traditional sources with “eWOM” or electronic word of mouth conversations. Examples of eWOM include blogs, review sites, and social networking sites where individuals or groups, who are often strangers, can interact with each other and share their opinions. Several social networking platforms did not exist until after 2003: Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Lehmann asked about the use of traditional word-of-mouth versus eWOM to 276 first-time, non-transfer undergraduate freshmen students who were enrolled at the University of Miami and born between 1985 and 1996. The conclusions: the data suggested that traditional word-of-mouth had a greater perceived influence than eWOM on these students' college choice. On the other hand, the data also suggested that eWOM had a greater perceived influence during the search phase as opposed to the choice phase. A more specific finding about eWOM: it had a greater perceived influence via online reviews or forums rather than through social networking sites. eWOM influenced a certain percentage of students when making application and enrollment decisions: one-third used eWOM when making an application decision and one-fourth used eWOM when making an enrollment decision. (“The Influence of Electronic Word-of-Mouth on College Search and Choice”, College and University, 92 no. 4, Nov 2017: 2-6).

Also in 2017, Marcia Layton Turner examined two specific online sources used by potential college students: school websites and social media. She distinguished the types of information students gathered from these different sources: general information about the school itself from school websites but a sense of the school climate from social media. Per a 2017 report that she cites, 2 out of 5 students decided on where to attend based on social media, but only after gathering information from school websites. The social media sources that students most commonly used include Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube so schools do likewise. (“Like, Love, Delete: Social Media’s Influence on College Choice”, Journal of College Admission, no. 237, Fall 2017: 31-33).

Now, six years later, a health pandemic has impacted everyone in the world: the virus Covid-19. The repercussions, which are ongoing, have affected potential college students thinking and planning for college, if they even decide to attend college. Also, what about the misinformation generated over these last six years about Covid and other events? Few states require the teaching of media literacy in schools so how do students learn to check the credibility of what they read and see online?