The Girl on the Train: A Novel

by Paula Hawkins

The #1 New York Times Bestseller, USA Today Book of the Year, now a major motion picture starring Emily Blunt. 

The debut psychological thriller that will forever change the way you look at other people's lives, from the author of Into the Water and A Slow Fire Burning.
 
“Nothing is more addicting than The Girl on the Train.”—Vanity Fair

“The Girl on the Train has more fun with unreliable narration than any chiller since Gone Girl. . . . [It] is liable to draw a large, bedazzled readership.”—The New York Times
 
“Marries movie noir with novelistic trickery. . . hang on tight. You'll be surprised by what horrors lurk around the bend.”—USA Today
 
“Like its train, the story blasts through the stagnation of these lives in suburban London and the reader cannot help but turn pages.”—The Boston Globe

“Gone Girl fans will devour this psychological thriller.”—People 
 
 
EVERY DAY THE SAME
Rachel takes the same commuter train every morning and night. Every day she rattles down the track, flashes past a stretch of cozy suburban homes, and stops at the signal that allows her to daily watch the same couple breakfasting on their deck. She’s even started to feel like she knows them. Jess and Jason, she calls them. Their life—as she sees it—is perfect. Not unlike the life she recently lost.

UNTIL TODAY
And then she sees something shocking. It’s only a minute until the train moves on, but it’s enough. Now everything’s changed. Unable to keep it to herself, Rachel goes to the police. But is she really as unreliable as they say? Soon she is deeply entangled not only in the investigation but in the lives of everyone involved. Has she done more harm than good?

• ISBN10: 1594634025
• ISBN13: 9781594634024
• Publish Date: 12 July 2016 (first published 1 January 2015)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Publisher: Penguin Putnam Inc
• Imprint: Riverhead Books,U.S.
• Format: Paperback (US Trade)
• Pages: 336
• Language: English
• URL: https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/isbn/9781594634024

Reviews

[celinenyx]

I know I'm at least several years late to the hype that is The Girl on the Train. It never really caught my attention when half the world seemed to be reading it, but ended up picking it up on a holiday. This book is intense. Every person is pretty much awful, but I found myself completely engrossed in the story. Even though I guessed what had happened about 20% in, it didn't dampen my enjoyment. The Girl on the Train hasn't left me happy per se - it is pretty grim - but at least satisfied.

---
Content warnings: sexual assault, emotional/sexual/physical abuse, miscarriage, death of baby, infertility, murder, fatphobia.

[layawaydragon]

Listened to the audiobook from the library. I of course heard about this book when the hype train launched, but didn't get to it. I haven't been spoiled about it either, and decided to finally borrow it from the library now that it's readily available.

I was intrigued and loved the characterization. Def kept reading to know about Rachel and Megan. Anna not so much. And the narrator for Anna did'nt do her any favors either.

The only thing about audiobooks is I wish they'd put "day of", last year, etc, instead of just the actual dates because I don't have a great memory for dates.

I did see two "surprises" coming and was itchy to get to the point. I listened to it all and it was good, but not that amazing so...it kinda feel like a meh due to the hype letdown.

The fake spoiler of her slitting a guy's throat while fucking a train was more interesting. lol.

Glad it's finally off my list. Next is Gone Girl.

[Pigpen.Reads]

This was kind of slow to start. It reminded me of "Gone Girl".
The plot twist, I didn't see coming at all!

[clementine]

Wasn’t expecting too much out of this book, but it was a solid thriller. It’s pretty fluffy, the prose isn’t amazing, and I figured out the twist ahead of time, but it was very readable. I’m on vacation right now so it was the perfect read!

[thepunktheory]

Full Review on: my Blog ThePunkTheory

Well, how do I get started with this one.
For me, there are several problems with this book. First of all, there was not a single likeable character in this novel. Rachel was mostly annoying and all of the others are simply not interesting and shallow. Especially the other women featured are either crazy, boring or bitches. Usually you read a book and are fascinated by at least some of the characters and you want to know more about them. In this case, you don't. Believe me. 
This gets me to my next problem. As none of the characters are the slightest bit capturing, you'll have a hard time getting pulled in by the story. The chapters are told from three perspectives: Rachel, Anna (her ex-husband's new wife) and Megan (the woman who went missing). Paula Hawkins gets a plus point for that but there's really not much more that I enjoyed about this book. You could see the end of the story coming from miles off and after about 1/3 of the pages you simply want to shout at the characters for being so dumb and not figuring out anything. 
The Girl on the Train reminded my quite a lot of Gone Girl, another book I didn't like too much. They are both what I'd call crazy bitch genre. To me that's not fascinating, empowering or depicting strong women. In both novels, many of the female characters are simply crazy bitches and nothing more.

[wcs53]

This one took a bit of time to get going. At first I found the different timelines a bit confusing, but once it got going I started to get it and watched as they slowly caught up with each other. I liked the way the story unfolded through the eyes of the three main female characters and, at times, I was trying to work out which of them was most reliable in the telling of the tale.

There were enough twists and turns in the book to keep me guessing almost to the end. It's definitely worth giving this one a try if you are a fan of thrillers. Now that I've finished it I'll need to finally check out the movie.

[mrs_mander_reads]

I was nervous about reading this book, because I rarely read suspense. However, I was hooked from the start. This book is was suspenseful, relatable, and just made me obsessive about how the story ended. I'm not too adept at figuring out mysteries, so I wasn't shocked to be stumped by this one - it was only in the last hour or so of the audio that I realized who was to blame. Can't wait to read the new Paula Hawkins.

[clq]

The Girl on The Train is perfectly ok. Disappointingly and underwhelmingly ok. I haven't seen the film, but my expectations were set pretty high based on what I've heard about the book. They weren't met.

Nothing felt natural. This isn't about the realism of the story, I've read of giant floating elephants in space which were written about in a way which made it sound natural, but this book gave me a feeling of everything being made up rather than that of a story being told.

The book definitely has very good moments though. Oddly, the best moments for me were the ones where nothing was happening, where loneliness, desperation, personal challenges, and sadness were conveyed in a way which felt very personal and real. Mind you, this didn't make the characters feel real, but made for some great passages which felt like they could almost have been read as standalone pieces and stood up by themselves. Otherwise the characters just feel, like the rest of the story, a little forced and unnatural. The story itself relies mostly (and predictably) on information being gradually revealed to the reader. I've loved this kind of storytelling before, but 20 pages into The Girl on The Train I just found myself not really caring about what happened next. I didn't feel much shock or surprise at any revelation, and I think this was partly because the reveals were presented in a way which felt so overstated that the DUN DUN DUN sound-effect almost jumped off the page. The reveals weren't a steady drip of new information, they were an occasional bucket of inoffensively lukewarm water poured down over my head.

After a while it felt formulaic. The reveals and twists didn't feel like they were there to enhance the plot, the plot felt more like filler meant to carry the reader through to the next reveal. And even the twists felt predictable a lot of the time. Some of them are foreshadowed in ways which made me read on mostly out of some mild interest in how something was going to happen, rather than the interest being in what was going to happen. In some books this is done very deliberately to throw the reader off. You think you know what is going to happen, the book purposefully does it subtly enough that you think you've been very clever, and then throws a curveball at you while shouting "HAH, Gotcha!" There is none of that in this book. The foreshadowing is duly dropped into the story like breadcrumbs, and the story eagerly follows the breadcrumbs all the way home.

Yet, despite all that, it's still an ok book. It's entertaining enough to serve as a distraction during a commute (I read it almost exclusively on the bus, I didn't really feel a strong desire to pick it up elsewhere), and the story is satisfying enough not to feel like a waste of time. The problem is that it feels like the kind of story that sets out to blow be away, it feels like the kind of story that should be able to blow me away, but it just doesn't get close.

[RoXXie]

Wow, was für ein Buch. Diese Wendung war nicht abzusehen.
Auch wenn es manchmal etwas langatmig wurde Rachel immer wieder über sich selbst jammern zu lesen, war es doch alles wichtig. Auch ihr Gejammer.

[girlinthepages]

The thing about thrillers is that it's usually best to write a review right after finishing it, because all of the twists, turns, and plot reveals and emotions they evoked as so fresh in your mind. However, with The Girl on the Train, I was so tired of it by the time I finally finished that I wasn't motivated to jot down my thoughts. My expectations were let down and I had no desire to relive the experience anytime soon. So now, a little over a month later, I'm catching up on reviews and struggling to remember the emotions that this book evoked other than boredom.

I was ALL OVER this book initially, considering the movie was receiving so much hype (and I really like Emily Blunt). I put off seeing the movie because I really wanted to read the book before I saw the movie (which I heard from many friends and coworkers was really good). Unfortunately, it took me so long to finish this book that I pretty much missed the opportunity to see the movie in theaters. While I didn't love Gone Girl, I found it to be a very engaging read, and all of the comparisons to it enticed me. However, I found The Girl on the Train to be painfully slow to get through, especially in the first half. I understand unlikable protagonists have their place and you don't have to like a protagonist to find them compelling, but Rachel was SO depressing and pathetic that I was legitimately angered by listening to her inner monologue and reading about the choices she made. It was so, so repetitive and I found that I couldn't become engaged in the narrative and really only finished it out of a sense of obligation because I paid for the book.

I also struggled to become super invested in the mystery itself. I realized I was over halfway through the book and felt like I was still waiting for the mystery element to pick up and really get into the "whodunnit" vibe. I had some suspicions that turned out correctly, but I also found the big reveal sort of implausible to be honest I just don't understand how all of these women were A) so into Tom and B) Didn't realize he was a totally shady troll right away. I suppose when you get right down to it I felt that the characters weren't super complex or nuanced in their motivations, and therefore I had a hard time believing that things escalated to the point they did, and that certain characters managed to hide what they did from others so well. The lack of interest in the characters, for me, was really what killed the Gone Girl comparisons that everyone was talking about, since Amy was so, so twisted and complex.

Overall: This book was the slowest thriller I've ever read, and felt more like a study in reading about miserable and unsatisfied middle aged people rather than a mystery. I hardly ever say this, but I probably should've just seen the movie instead.This review was originally posted on Girl in the Pages