The Grown Up by Gillian Flynn: Book Review

After finally getting around to reading Gone Girl last year and loving it, I bought Gillian Flynn’s other books including The Grown Up. The Grown Up isn’t a novel, it’s a short story, and I read it in about forty five minutes so it’s ideal for a short commute or to read on your lunch break or something, but not something to pick up if you’re looking to get your teeth into something.

The Grown Up by Gillian Flynn

Blurb from The Back Cover

A young woman is making a living faking it as a cut price psychic (with some illegal soft core sex work on the side). She makes a decent wage mostly by telling people what they want to hear. But then she meets Susan Burke.

Susan moved to the city one year ago with her husband and fifteen year old stepson Miles. They live in a Victorian house called Carterhook Manor. Susan has become convinced that some malevolent spirit is inhabiting their home. The young woman doesn’t believe in exorcism or the supernatural. However, when she enters the house for the first time, she begins to feel it too, as if the very house is watching her, waiting, biding its time …

My Thoughts On The Book

For all The Grown Up is a short story, there is an incredible amount packed into it and it pulls you in straight away. The reader is instantly introduced to the main character, who in all honesty is a con artist playing on people’s vulnerabilities, and yet there is still something likeable about her. Maybe it’s because we get enough of her back story to learn what fuelled her conning ways, maybe it’s just that her cons are, for the most part, harmless, and in some ways, I kind of agree with her philosophy that she’s providing a service that makes people happy, even if it’s not in the way they think it is.

We learn enough about the character to feel like we know her, although strangely, we never learn her name. I’m not sure if this is intentional, and to be honest, I didn’t actually notice it was the case until I sat down to write this review and realised I didn’t know it.

When the girl meets Susan, she cooks up a whole plan on how to either a) con her, or b) make her feel better, depending on how you view what the main character does. She ends up going to Susan’s house and that’s when the real fun begins.

Flynn is a master at creating an uncomfortable atmosphere and there’s definitely something off in that house – but is it really a ghost or is it something much more fundamental than that?

The story has a fairly open ending that you can interpret more than one way, and generally, I’m not a fan of that kind of ending, but I think for this story, it works really well and it really was a perfect ending. The ending, along with the twists in the story, definitely make it worth a read.

Conclusion and Rating

I always find that a good short story tells the story it needs to tell and at the same time, leaves you wanting more. The Grown Up definitely did both of those things. It pulled me in from the beginning and never let me go, even after I finished reading it. 5/5.

You can grab your copy of The Grown Up here.

Have you read The Grown Up? Did you enjoy it? Let me know in the comments 🙂

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