Elizabeth is Missing, book review. (Emma Healey)

Confused.

That's how this book made me feel, confused. Let me explain.

The style is easy but the subject matter, dementia, is tough but handled well.
Our main character, Maud, is slowly losing her way in the world, wondering how one grows marrows and where her friend Elizabeth is. She is both warm and lovable, as well as damned right annoying, like your own Nan/Mum, maybe, and you feel for her.
She gets on the bus but can't remember why, goes to the shop to buy food she already has, driving her daughter Helen, mad, and she has a fixation on her friend Elizabeth, being missing. There are subtleties and quirks to her character that are very believable and you quickly warm to her, worrying that she might get lost or worse, injure herself.

I like the back story too - Maud's sister goes missing when she is a teenager - and the decisions she makes when she was still a child felt plausible and realistic, and I thought the narrative when she is older and confused, forgetting things that have just been explained to her, is well written and convincing, but for me the book jumps from the past to the present too much. I would have preferred the book to have been in parts rather than chapters. Let me explain.

Every chapter is split between the past and the present, and there are a lot of chapters in what is a relatively short book, and it is here that I think it would have worked better if there had been a run of chapters focusing on the past, and then the same for the present, so one could get more involved with the characters of that time, and what was happening to them, before hopping back and forth; other than that, the book was an enjoyable read.
Three stars then for Elizabeth is Missing.