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
• Imprint: Riverhead Books
• Format: Paperback (US Trade)
• Pages: 336
• Language: English
• URL: https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/isbn/9781594634024

Reviews

[Ashley]

I can describe 90% of the book with one word:

boring

so.boring.

Nothing happened for literally about 90% of the story. I was sooo bored.

Then, once we got into it, I started feeling another emotion: hatred. I literally hated (or at least didn't like) every single character.

Sure, I understood why some of the characters (mainly the MC) were such a mess. For a while I sympathized, but honestly my patience wore thin. They were all either absolutely nuts and kept making the same mistakes over and over, or they were just annoying.

Even when everything came together at the end and got a bit more exciting, I still wasn't nearly as excited as I should have been, largely because I didn't care about ANYONE. I had no one to root for since I kind of hated them all. This made me pretty indifferent about solving the mystery all together.

Also, I felt like there weren't enough breadcrumbs leading us to the mystery. Usually I like it to be a surprise, but then I like to look back at the breadcrumbs and think, "Ohh yeah, that makes sense now." But in this book, it felt more like, "Oh, btw, here's some information I never told you that totally explains why this happened." It's just kind of dumped on us in the last 10% with no solid evidence leading back to it at the beginning. (Unless I'm #epicfail and just missed it completely...)

I really wanted to like this book, but it was just too slow/boring for too long, and I wanted at least one character to fall in love with and be able to stand behind.. but I literally couldn't root for any of them. :(

[Whitney @ First Impressions Reviews]

I would be lying if I said I wasn't disappointed in The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins. The plot was so inticing and appeared to be a thriller with a twist. Sadly, the characters were one dementional and truthfully did not care for any of them. This was to the point were I didn't care about the outcome. The plot was so far-fetched and came off as forced with a conclusion I saw 100 pages earlier. I so wanted to like this book but with each promising twist a wrong turn was made that only led to dissatisfaction of a lost opportunity. The Unfortunate thing about The Girl on the Train was that it had the potential to be a good thriller. However, it missed the mark by a long shot and felt cheated of time lost.

[Bianca]

— Culprit is predictable but then again for me this book was never about really solving the mystery, but about exploring all these twisted characters and all their little secrets.

[Liz (Bent Bookworm)]

2.5/5 stars. Writing was compelling, characters were not. Ever. At all. It would have been a much better book with at least one character to root for. The MC was so hung up over A MAN. As were the other two secondary female characters. For the thousandth time, can women please not be defined by the men in their lives??

[Nicole Lynn]

3.5 stars, Review to come :)

[Eve1972]

Everyone and their brother seems to have read this one, so I thought it was time I gave into peer pressure and gave it a go.



I enjoyed this one for the most part. I wasn't as blown away as I expected to be with all the hype surrounding it. It kept me guessing until the end though. There were a couple things that really didn't make any sense, and I didn't find a single character particularly likable. But overall I am glad I gave it a go.

[empressbrooke]

I see a lot of comparisons to Gone Girl in the reviews here. I guess it's superficially like Gone Girl, in the sense that if you like psychological thrillers filled with flawed people that you won't like but will find interesting, you will probably like this one. The narrators are unreliable, but unlike Gone Girl, no one is purposefully trying to lead the reader astray.

The most interesting part of the book to me was the primary narrator's insertion of herself into the mystery. Rachel is an alcoholic - she is narcissistic, has a very loose grasp on problem solving skills, and (probably her #1 defining trait) she has really, really terrible boundaries. She has next to nothing to do with the murder victim, but she forcibly inserts herself into the investigation by talking to the police and hounding the victim's husband. Instead of simply reporting the one piece of information she has, she twists the situation around to make it all about herself.

In most amateur sleuth novels, the main character is welcomed into the investigation, or at least not treated with the side-eye a random civilian would be given in real life. However, Rachel's attempts to join the fray are treated with derision and hostility. She is being incredibility inappropriate, and everyone tells her so, but her narcissism continually leads to her elevating her own self importance in the case. She does eventually solve the mystery, but she's a train wreck, not a hero.

Ultimately, this is an impressive debut. I'm excited to see what Hawkins does in the future, and I'm always thrilled to add another woman to my list of "awesome mystery/thriller authors."

[EBookObsessed]

DNF.

Horrible. Horrible. Horrible! I could not finish listening to this story.

My mother recommended The Girl on the Train to me and then she kept asking if I had read it. Since I had to use my audible credits, I downloaded a copy of The Girl on the Train and made it my next audiobook selection.

The basic premise of the story is the Rachel takes the train each morning into London and again back home. Each time she reaches the station near her old home that she shared with her ex-husband, the train slows down and sometimes is even required to stop. Each day, Rachel is treated to seeing into her old home that Tom is now sharing with his new wife, Anna and their baby. In order to avoid looking at her old house, she has taken to looking at the young couple who live in the house a few doors down and who moved in after she moved out. As she peeks into their house ever morning and evening, Rachel has created this wonderful fantasy life for “Jess” and her beloved husband. “Jess” turns out to be Megan and Rachel learns this when she sees the newspaper article that Megan has gone missing. Rachel becomes involved in the investigation, especially after she sees Jess/Megan kissing a man in her backyard who was not her husband. Did Megan run away with her lover or possibly was she murdered by her jealous husband? Rachel must solve this mystery.

If there is worse cast of characters in a story, I can’t think of one at the moment. This story is told in the form of diary entries. We started with Rachel on the train for what seems to be a normal commute. As we learn more and more about Rachel, we find out that she is an alcoholic which started after her ideal marriage to Tom failed after he cheated on her with his new wife, Anna. Listening to Rachel is depressing. She has been living in a room at her friend’s house, not even a close friend, for what is now going on two years, and she is still commuting to London each day even though she lost her job, due to the drinking, several months ago. She just hangs around at the library each day instead of maybe looking for a new job. She does this so her friend doesn’t realize that she is unemployed and as pathetic as we all find her, but everyone, including her friend, who already knows how sad and pathetic Rachel is. Including Rachel’s ex-husband and his wife who she drunk dials in the middle of the night over and over and over again. None of which Rachel remembers since she drinks herself into blackouts.

When we finally get a look into the real life of Megan, we find her as pathetic and sad as Rachel, just without the booze. Megan uses sex as a replacement. Her diary entries start about a year prior to Rachel’s portion of the story. Megan lost her job in the local art gallery several months prior when they closed up and she has not gotten a new job since. That also seems to be a theme, that these women, once they are married are just kept at home and living off of the husband, but they are bored out of their minds and don’t know what to do with themselves. Megan is a bucket of anxiety which eventually leads her to counseling and a doctor who she has an affair with, and we find out it is not the first man she has cheated with. Megan’s life changed in her teen years when her beloved brother was killed in a motorcycle accident. Her brother’s death sent her adrift and she doesn’t know what she wants or what would make her happy.

For awhile, Megan worked for Rachel’s ex-husband taking care of their baby, which she really had no interest in doing, but her husband hoped it would give her the baby-bug since he wants to start a family. The new wife Anna, was a stay-at-home mother and didn’t do anything while Megan was watching the kid except sit around watching Megan. Again, women are portrayed here as stay-at-home losers who do nothing all day but be bored and unhappy.

THOUGHTS:
I got to a point after several hours of audiobook that I simply could not subject myself to listening to these two prattle on and on about their pathetic lives any longer. Neither one doing anything to improve their unhappiness or even knowing what they could or should do to improve their lives.

Since my mother wouldn’t tell me how the story ended, I did find a spoiler thread on Goodreads so that I could find out what happened with Megan, did she disappear or was she murdered?

You can either subject yourself to almost 11 hours of torture or wait until the movies comes out later this year and subject yourself to only 2 hours of torture or you can simply head over to Goodreads and read the spoiler thread for yourself.

I have since looked at several reviews which compares this to Gone Girl which I saw at the movies and absolutely hated those characters. Maybe that explains that this type of story is simply not for me.

This was one of the few times that I took audible up on their standard offer of returning a book that you don’t like.

[neddieb]

At first I was confused because the chapters were back and forth with characters, however I eventually started to get the hang of it. I totally enjoyed this story. It was really good.

[ross91]

Dnf at 70%
I really thought that the beginning had potential. I liked the fact that the main protagonist is an alcoholic and a wreck, even though it was very depressing to read. My problem was with the mystery part: for me the identity of the guilty person was really too obvious from the start. That's why at 60% I couldn't see the point in continuing this book.
The style was sometimes confusing and I often couldn't recognize the different povs from one another.
I decided to read the last few pages and I was right: really predictable ending.