Yellow Birds by Kenvin Powers vs. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

These two books have several things in common:

·         Narrators are unreliable.

·         The main characters are psychopaths or behave like psychopaths under their circumstances.

·         The main characters do not possess a moral compass.

·         There is no resolution of the conflict faced by the protagonists.

·         These two books were very difficult for me to read. I wanted each of them to be finished sooner, but unfortunately both needed to be as long as they were.

·         Both books are award nominees. The Yellow Birds was a National Book Award Finalist and Gone Girl is nominated for an Edgar Award.

The Yellow Birds is conflicted in its voice – our narrator sounds like a soldier when he speaks with other soldiers, but sounds like a poet in all his description and contemplation. These two don’t fit together for me. That being said the book is a good read if you want to hear the painful garbled confession of a combat soldier. I have known several soldiers who have told me their very difficult stories of what occurred while they were deployed. Their stories, like Bartle’s in Yellow Birds, brought me to tears.  Like Bartle, they too found life after combat a very difficult adjustment.

Gone Girl is a real page turner and reads like marriage gone badly under the hands of Alfred Hitchcock. I felt totally manipulated and occasionally strangely delighted with the author’s dark wit. Her description of character behavior in so many situations is startlingly accurate and perfectly described.  Most of the characters are quite despicable. While I hate the story, I find the book to be very well written and I choose it over Yellow Birds for that reason.   Ruth Schuster