The Girl on the Train
The Girl on the Train, a fictional crime mystery written by Paula Hawkins, tells the story of a British woman who went missing.
Here’s a brief overview of the characters who tell the story:
Rachel is in her early 30s and unemployed due to her alcoholism, which she’s had for quite a while. She’s still healing from the dissolution of her marriage and coping with the fact that her ex-husband, Tom, remarried and had a child with his new wife, Anna, almost immediately. She spends her days drinking on the train, pretending to go to work, and looking out the window at the house that used to be hers.
Anna is an insecure, uptight, stay-at-home mother who loves to compare herself with Tom’s ex-wife. Anna lives on the same block as Megan, who went missing - her search drives the plot of this novel.
Megan is deeply unhappy with her life. She used to love her job at the art gallery, but she’s now a stay-at-home wife, marinating in the uneventfulness of suburban life.
The one thing this book does really well is the execution of having multiple narrators tell the story. Each point of view brought new information to light and created multiple leads for the reader to follow. However, that’s probably the only thing this book gets right.
While this book was easy to read, it was also dreadfully painful to get through because of the characters. There is not a single likable character in this book. I don’t know when authors decided that making every single character in their book an asshole would make for an interesting read, but it made the stakes so low. I wasn’t invested in a single character’s well-being, and that took away a lot of the suspense that usually makes for a good psychological thriller. Hawkins made each of the narrators so unreliable that there was no point in speculating what the truth actually was. On top of that, the three different narrators spoke in such a similar voice that I had to frequently go back to the beginning of the chapter to check who’s actually talking.
Aside from having characters that I could not stand, this book was also SO slow. Nothing happens until the last quarter of it, and I found myself rooting for Rachel to get into dangerous situations just so SOMETHING would be happening. It didn’t matter what happened to her or any of the characters she interacted with (like I said before, the stakes are just so, so low because the characters are so despicable), I just wanted something to happen outside of her usual routine of waking up and drinking herself to oblivion. Instead, all that happened was Rachel got on the train to pretend to go to work, she got drunk, she nosed around, and she stumbled home so that her roommate could tell her how much of a mess she was. Rinse and repeat.
This book had so much potential. The premise is so, so promising, but the execution just didn’t come through. The writing felt sloppy, the characters felt surface-level, and, for a book claiming to be a psychological thriller, it was awfully drab.
Rating: 2/10
