The Grownup, Gillian Flynn
The Grownup, Gillian Flynn
13 Rating(s)
List: $9.99 | Sale: $7.00
Club: $4.99

The Grownup
A Story by the Author of Gone Girl

Bestseller

Author: Gillian Flynn

Narrator: Julia Whelan

Unabridged: 1 hr 17 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 11/03/2015


Synopsis

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Gillian Flynn’s Edgar Award-winning homage to the classic ghost story, published for the first time as a standalone.

A canny young woman is struggling to survive by perpetrating various levels of mostly harmless fraud. On a rainy April morning, she is reading auras at Spiritual Palms when Susan Burke walks in. A keen observer of human behavior, our unnamed narrator immediately diagnoses beautiful, rich Susan as an unhappy woman eager to give her lovely life a drama injection. However, when the "psychic" visits the eerie Victorian home that has been the source of Susan’s terror and grief, she realizes she may not have to pretend to believe in ghosts anymore. Miles, Susan’s teenage stepson, doesn’t help matters with his disturbing manner and grisly imagination. The three are soon locked in a chilling battle to discover where the evil truly lurks and what, if anything, can be done to escape it.

“The Grownup,” which originally appeared as “What Do You Do?” in George R. R. Martin’s Rogues anthology, proves once again that Gillian Flynn is one of the world’s most original and skilled voices in fiction.

About Gillian Flynn

Missouri born author, Gillian Schiller Flynn, was raised in Kansas City by parents who were both professors at a local community college. She is said to have been painfully shy as a child, and found an escape mechanism in reading and writing.

After earning her degrees at the University of Kansas and Northwestern University, Flynn did freelance writing for U.S. News and World Report, then was hired by Entertainment Weekly. She was laid off from that position in 2008, but has nevertheless been quoted as saying that she could not have written a novel had it not been for being a journalist first. It taught her that, when writing, you cannot wait for something spiritual to move you......you just have to start writing and get it done

A recurring frustration for Author Flynn has been the notion held by many readers and critics alike, that women in general must always be good, nurturing people. She said readers sometimes still have trouble with a female character just being "pragmatically evil, bad, and selfish". While she was working for Entertainment Weekly, she was also writing novels during her own free time. Among her three novels are Sharp Objects, Dark Places, and Gone Girl. Each of the three have had their own great success, but most popular has been Gone Girl, which was adapted to film by Flynn after the rights were sold to Twentieth Century Fox for $1.5 million, and was released in October of 2014 to critical acclaim. The awards list seems never-ending for all three novels.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Emily May on September 26, 2015

The first part of this short story is... expected. It is exactly what I would expect from Gillian Flynn. An unnamed female narrator manipulates people every day in her job - from giving hand jobs to wealthy men to reading people's "auras". I didn't stop giving hand jobs because I wasn't good at i......more

Goodreads review by karen on June 20, 2018

holiday hand jobs are sad for everyone. 2/3 of this story is fantastic. the ending is not. you know how at the end of clue, you get a reasonable explanation for the murders and then this flashes on the screen: followed by a less-satisfying solution and then this followed by the big, silly ensemble ending......more

Goodreads review by Lala on December 10, 2018

read it for the first time in the Rogues anthology and loved it. bought it as it's own copy and loved it even more the second time around.......more

Goodreads review by Delee on February 20, 2017

2.5 Let me just start by saying- I am a huge Gillian Flynn fan. I loved Dark Places more than words can say- and I adored Gone Girl. So I am not one of the "what is all the hype about?" people. ...but where THE GROWN UP is concerned....I don't get it. This is just not good. Not good at all. It started......more

Goodreads review by Alejandro on January 08, 2016

I loved the book! What better compliment can I say? TWISTING YOUR MIND Gillian Flynn! You did it again! I loved to read this short story! I loved how Gillian Flynn, the author, played with my brain. At the end of the reading, my mind was so screwed up (but in the good way!), that I was thankful......more