Book Recommendation

The Vanishing Game was a book that really interested me. I really enjoy mystery murder mystery novels, suspense and related genre books. The reason I picked up this book it because of its suspenseful cover. It made me think it was a science fiction story due to the reasoning that the people could not just vanish. But as the plot thickened, I became more apparent that it was actually a story about misperception.

If you enjoy reading this book I recommend that you pick up, Murder on Orient Express by Agatha Christie. This book is honestly one of the best books I have ever read! The plot of this story just thickens with every paragraph. For a general gist of this book link this link: http://www.shmoop.com/murder-on-orient-express/summary.html. It’s basically a story of a detective trying to figure out who killed a man on the train. It was a very surprising twist at the end. It wasn’t an ending you could just predict like other mystery stories, the author made sure to state every single suspicion anyone could have had and created a great ending. 

Changing Character

     Throughout this novel we have seen Jocelyn to be the one with a lot of answers and insight on where and how to find Jack. I feel as if over the course of the plot, she doubts herself more.  The interactions between her and Noah seem to have remained the same overall. She was a very prominent character in composing the theme. As I mentioned in the previous blog post, she contributed in changing the theme from a more mysterious to a broader theme. Something along the lines of; “everything is not what it seems”. That’s because she was in a mental state in which she tried to cope with her brother’s death at the age of 14, and create another personality in which she acted like Jack never died. The reader’s would have thought she was actually looking for Jack but it was all in their heads.

Changing Theme

The theme of this novel has been constantly changing throughout. At the beginning it seem to be a very mysterious theme because Jack, who was dead, had written a letter to Jocelyn. This theme was carried out for a majority of the plot as Noah and Jocelyn searched for Jack. As the story went on, the theme of mystery remained but seemed not as important as the overall theme that everything is not what it seems. This could also be seen as mystery but in this book I think it means to not get caught up in the details, just see the overall picture. This is because during the book I thought Jocelyn would be the one to know all the information and be on top of things. But little did I know that she herself was coping with a major issue that could have stopped her from going through all the searching.

Ending

The ending of this novel, The Vanishing Game was confusing. The hidden clues the author threw in did not really seem of any significance until I reached the ending. When Jocelyn was having flashbacks of their childhood, Kate Myers was hinting at the fact that Jack had died way before. Jocelyn was in some sort of denial state of mind. Or confused as to what had happened. I thought she was in just in shock. Then after a lot of close reading and rereading of the confusing passages did I come to an understanding that Jocelyn had a mental situation in which she “kept her brother alive”.  She takes on Jack’s personality as a part of her own. It is a sort of twisted ending. I was predicting that someone was hiding Jack but I came to know Jocelyn was pretending a part of herself was Jack to help herself cope with his death.

Here is a video to check out explaining a little bit more about the book: