The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins

The Girl on the Train

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?

Reviewed by clq on

3 of 5 stars

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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.

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  • Started reading
  • 26 July, 2017: Finished reading
  • 26 July, 2017: Reviewed