Rating: 
Summary: A departure for Hunter
Review: I've been a fan of Evan Hunter for years. This book is very good, but very different from his usual genre/content/style. Read it with no preconceptions, as if it was written by an unknown author.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant Piece of Work
Review: I've been reading Hunter/McBain for a couple of years now. Hunter has captured the denial, the frustrations, everything that goes along with a family dealing with a mental illness. I've seen movies on this topic, have read other books yet, none can match the writing of Hunter. His portrayal and command of the english language come second to none, you ARE going on this journey with them. A must read for everyone who likes a hard read yet one that will yank the heart strings. I wish we could give it more stars than 5. He is a master at his craft.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant Piece of Work
Review: I've been reading Hunter/McBain for a couple of years now. Hunter has captured the denial, the frustrations, everything that goes along with a family dealing with a mental illness. I've seen movies on this topic, have read other books yet, none can match the writing of Hunter. His portrayal and command of the english language come second to none, you ARE going on this journey with them. A must read for everyone who likes a hard read yet one that will yank the heart strings. I wish we could give it more stars than 5. He is a master at his craft.
Rating: 
Summary: Stick with the 87th!
Review: I've read at least three books by Evan Hunter, CRIMINAL CONVERSATION, PRIVILEGED CONVERSATION, AND CANDYLAND, the last of which he wrote with his alter ego, Ed McBain. I've read about half of McBain's 87th Precinct series. I liked all of the Hunter books and loved all of the 87th Precinct novels. Hunter loves them, too; his writing comes alive when he writes about Steve Carella, Meyer Meyer, and the boys. That's not happening in THE MOMENT SHE WAS GONE.
There isn't one single character in TMSWG that I liked. The narrator, Andrew Gulliver, is a jerk and a whiner. His twin sister, Annie, is schizophrenic. For thirty-six years the Gulliver family is in denial about Annie's mental health. Andrew doesn't even believe it when Annie hits his wife with a hammer. And he wonders why she divorces him after only three years of marriage.
"Gross" would be a good word to describe some of the scenes and flashbacks. Annie returns from Indonesia with lice; she urinates on the leg of a policeman; she makes jewelry in the form of male and female sex organs. No, this just won't do. Certainly schizophrenia is not a pretty thing to behold, but a dramatic portrayal of mental illness must be believable. Better to read I NEVER PROMISED YOU A ROSE GARDEN or THE BELL JAR.
Rating: 
Summary: Depressing tale about a mentally ill woman and her family.
Review: In a departure for him, Evan Hunter (also known as Ed McBain), has written a domestic drama, "The Moment She Was Gone." It is the story of a family in crisis because one of its members is schizophrenic. Annie Gulliver has always been a beautiful, vibrant and intelligent individual. She and her twin brother, Andrew, are extremely close, and Andrew thinks that he knows and understands Annie more than anyone. However, after exhibiting alarming behavior changes over a period of years, Annie disappears one day, and no one knows where she has gone. In a series of flashbacks, Hunter shows Annie's behavior becoming increasingly erratic. She drops out of school and, financed by her mother, Annie travels all over the world. She has outlandish experiences, some real and others, the products of an increasingly delusional mind. During a trip to Sicily, Annie claims that she was attacked. After retaliating against her "attacker," Annie is arrested and subsequently institutionalized. Her psychiatrist diagnoses her as schizophrenic and Andrew travels to Italy to take Annie home. Although the twins' brother Aaron and his wife, Augusta, believe that Annie needs psychiatric help, it takes years for Andrew and his mother to acknowledge that Annie is seriously ill. They chalk up her bizarre behavior to eccentricity. Only after the evidence of her illness is incontrovertible, do they finally take responsibility for getting Annie the help that she so desperately needs. This is a very sad picture of a dysfunctional family in denial. Unfortunately, "The Moment She Was Gone" does not coalesce into a compelling story. Hunter's novel rambles as he goes back and forth in time, describing Annie's troublesome statements and her bizarre actions, as well as her family's reactions to the changes in her. This makes for a rather flimsy story. I would recommend this book mostly for people who are interested in fiction dealing with how individuals and families suffer as a result of this tragic illness. Although "The Moment She Was Gone" is a decent character study and it addresses an extremely important subject, it is unlikely to appeal to a wide range of readers.
Rating:
Summary: A wonderful and haunting story
Review: It was a delight to have found this book (hardcover version) in the bookstore. I found it a fast-paced and thoroughly enjoyable read. The narrative style of the story pulls the reader along with the main character; you live and feel his frustrations. His journey is your journey. For an author to inspire such feelings of empathy (and to do it so routinely as does Evan Hunter) is truly magnificent. This was a sad but beautiful tale and I recommend it entirely.
Rating:
Summary: The Moment She Was Gone
Review: Like a lot of Ed McBain / Evan Hunter devotees, the long wait for The Moment She Was Gone was agonizing, yet worthwhile. Hunter takes the reader through the long story of a family touched by mental illness. While the book keeps your attention, the reader can't but help drifting off into the real world where each and everyone knows of a family member or someone elses family where someone suffers from a mental illness that comes and goes. As this book comes to a close, we see that some mental illness is never resolved. I would recommend this book to anyone that likes a story that will provoke them to thinking the unthinkable.
Rating:
Summary: Evan Hunter is The Master at just everything he attempts
Review: Mr. Hunter won me over for the umpteenth time with this one, given that I've been reading - and loving - for a good thirty years the work of this extraordinary author, both as Evan Hunter and as Ed McBain (I pride myself about not having skipped any title whatsoever in McBain's own nearly fifty-year-old 87th Precinct police procedural series, a never ending stream of genial and inventive writing which has been ripped off by virtually anyone, especially TV shows, without ever achieving results which can be remotely compared to its original brilliance). The first Evan Hunter novel I ever read was Second Ending (1956), and it greatly affected my teenage years. I read it and re-read it so many times that my old paperback copy is by now nearly destroyed. The latest Hunter to grace my bookshelves is, of course, this melancholic, somewhat elegiac and yet achingly realistic-feeling gem, The Moment She Was Gone. I caught some intriguing analogies between these two Hunter masterpieces. Both novels show us the deep sufferings of frail young people - in Second Ending it was twentysomething heroin addict/former brilliant jazz musician Andy Silvera; now it's thirtysomething schizophrenic/former brilliant student Annie Gulliver. Both novels offer riveting and layered portrayals of a badly damaged yet sensitive person, once full of promises, caught in the titanic struggle of coping with the very essence of his/her sufferings as well as with the nostalgia for a past which can't return. Then again, we actually see all of that mainly through the eyes of a sort of chorus (Andy's friends there, Annie's family here), and especially through the eyes of the one single person (Bud Donato there, Annie's twin, Andy, here) whose soul is closest than anyone else's to the suffering, struggling one. In both novels the result is staggeringly beautiful, and also - in the end - powerfully cathartic. At the end of their (and our own) respective emotional journeys, we find that our "guides" - Bud Donato there, Andy Gulliver here - have grown dramatically, becoming better beings, more open-minded ones, more understanding ones, and they have to thank for that none other than their "flawed" loved ones. This is a beautiful concept. What also strikes me in The Moment She Was Gone is Evan Hunter's uncanny ability to faithfully - yet emotionally - portray the life of a schizophrenic person's family like it actually is in reality.
I've known two girls who were exactly like Annie Gulliver. One, the sister of a male schoolmate of mine, committed suicide many years ago, in her early twenties, by jumping out of a window. It wasn't her first suicide attempt. She was an incredibly brilliant student, just like her brother, my friend.
The other girl is luckily alive, even though for years she refused to take her medications and transformed her mother's life into a permanent nightmare; she was a former classmate of my sister, and she had what everyone initially defined just "an artistic streak" - she made jewelry just like Annie Gulliver did, she wrote poems, she was also as beautiful as an angel ... I saw these two girls closely mirrored in Annie Gulliver's struggle with her own inner voices, as well as I saw their families closely mirrored in Andy Gulliver, his mother, his brother Aaron, his sister-in-law Augusta ... Evan Hunter delivers here a perfect blend of realism, craft and - most of all - overwhelming humanity. A must-read, and five stars out of five.
Rating:
Summary: INCREDIBLE INSIGHTS
Review: Not too many books can look into this illness with such empathy and honesty. A thoughtful, provoking read from one of America's finest
writers. For people who want to be informed as well as entertained.
Rating:
Summary: Typical Evan Hunter... awesome!
Review: Nothing short of what you'd expect from Evan Hunter/Ed McBain. He's an incredible author and this is yet another book attesting to that fact.
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