Book Review - Elizabeth Is Missing by Emma Healey

 

Maud is an elderly woman dealing with the early stages of dementia. As she is slowly losing her memory and her grip on everyday life, she is certain that her best friend has disappeared. Her search for Elizabeth goes back decades and she refuses to give up about her friend.

No one believes Maud, not even her daughter, Helen or her caretakers and the police. Maud has her handwritten notes that she leaves for herself while she searches for the truth. However, she can't fight the overwhelming feeling that Elizabeth is in dire need of her help. Maud resolves to find out the truth about her friend.

As Maud begins focusing on Elizabeth, her obsession leads to her rapidly being more forgetful while leading her to remember about her sister, Sukey. Her sister had vanished shortly after World War II and was never heard from again. As she remembers vivid memories of Sukey, she wonders if it ties into Elizabeth's disappearance.

I thought the book had an interesting premise of an elderly woman with cognitive issues trying to solve two disappearances. However, I found the novel to be boring and incredibly repetitive after awhile. We would gleam a nugget of information on either Sukey or Elizabeth and then Maud would forget. I also didn't like that Maud clearly needed to be institutionalized and that having her living alone was dangerous to her well-being. Even though she was a fictionalized character, I kept worrying about her safety every time she was hungry or left her house. I stopped reading the book one third of the way because it started getting too repetitive and had to much detail about Maud's everyday life than the actual "disappearance".