No Time for Goodbye
BOOK REVIEW No Time for Goodbye
- Linwood Barclay It may be a cliché to say that a novel was impossible to put down. But this is true in case of the novel “No time for Goodbyes” by Linwood Barclay. This best -selling novel has its high point at the beginning where we are told that a teenage girl wakes up one day to find her parents and her brother missing. This not only awakens the curiosity of the reader but is also a fascinating plot as it is the reversal of the traditional ‘child-gone-missing’ theme.
Fourteen year old Cynthia Bigge is portrayed as a typical troublesome teenager who is caught out late one night with her boyfriend. She is dragged home by her fuming father, Clayton Bigge. She then storms into her room and locks herself fueled by the alcohol she had consumed with her boyfriend where she falls into slumber. It’s only late in the morning after to struggles to drag herself out of her bed that she realizes her father, mother, Patricia and brother, Todd are missing with no note of explanation. She is left with a mixed feeling of abandonment, guilt and curiosity.
The novel then takes us twenty fives ahead. Cynthia is now in her late thirties, married and with a daughter, but the pain of her family’s disappearance still lingers in her life. From this point though, the reader tends to get slightly detached from the novel as her husband, Terry Archer is now the narrator. The novel also takes a boring turn here as we’re waiting for an explanation for her family’s disappearance which Barclay has managed to drag to quite an extent. It describes the way in which Terry helps her get an answer. But there are also parts where Ted along with the readers is given an impression that Cynthia herself must have been responsible for her family to vanish like that. It also suggests at several points that Cynthia has lost her mind and is hallucinating her father.
The plot also includes Tess Burman, Cynthia’s
- Linwood Barclay It may be a cliché to say that a novel was impossible to put down. But this is true in case of the novel “No time for Goodbyes” by Linwood Barclay. This best -selling novel has its high point at the beginning where we are told that a teenage girl wakes up one day to find her parents and her brother missing. This not only awakens the curiosity of the reader but is also a fascinating plot as it is the reversal of the traditional ‘child-gone-missing’ theme.
Fourteen year old Cynthia Bigge is portrayed as a typical troublesome teenager who is caught out late one night with her boyfriend. She is dragged home by her fuming father, Clayton Bigge. She then storms into her room and locks herself fueled by the alcohol she had consumed with her boyfriend where she falls into slumber. It’s only late in the morning after to struggles to drag herself out of her bed that she realizes her father, mother, Patricia and brother, Todd are missing with no note of explanation. She is left with a mixed feeling of abandonment, guilt and curiosity.
The novel then takes us twenty fives ahead. Cynthia is now in her late thirties, married and with a daughter, but the pain of her family’s disappearance still lingers in her life. From this point though, the reader tends to get slightly detached from the novel as her husband, Terry Archer is now the narrator. The novel also takes a boring turn here as we’re waiting for an explanation for her family’s disappearance which Barclay has managed to drag to quite an extent. It describes the way in which Terry helps her get an answer. But there are also parts where Ted along with the readers is given an impression that Cynthia herself must have been responsible for her family to vanish like that. It also suggests at several points that Cynthia has lost her mind and is hallucinating her father.
The plot also includes Tess Burman, Cynthia’s