Book Review: Girl on the Train - Entrepreneur Generations

My first bit of winter break racing was quick: I read Paula Hawkins' novel Girl on the Train in just a few hours, mostly a drive home to Michigan for the holiday. I expected this highly-acclaimed novel to be something like Gone Girl -- a book I loved: in other words, a well-written thriller, completely satisfying with some twists and intriguing characters. And, mostly, it was: it was a smart page-turner with some deft twists.

Emily Blunt starring in the film version of the novel.

Hawkins employs three narrators -- the protagonist and title character, Rachel; the woman who disappears, Megan; and Anna, a neighbor. Rachel, the main narrator, is an alcoholic, and spends most of the book drunk, which of course makes her narration unreliable, which is one of the keys to the intrigue of the novel. When we meet her, her character is in shambles, having lost her husband and her job, which she pretends she still has by riding the train every morning. Her life is so vacant that she takes to creating fantasies of people she sees from her train window, in particular a couple she names "Jason" and "Jess" in her head. When "Jess" turns up missing on the front page of newspapers shortly after the book begins -- we, and Rachel, learn her real name is Megan, and she later becomes one of the narrators -- Rachel finds herself slowly being enmeshed into the situation.

We sympathize with Rachel, but, like the police, we view her askew: she's a drunk, she's dangerously obsessed with her ex-husband and his infant child, and she lies a lot. When we begin hearing from the multiple narrators, we question her even more, but they do more than that: they humanize the victim, Megan, giving her a bit of a tragic past and making us care had happened to her, more than Rachel's sometimes addled thoughts made us care.

Much of the suspense comes from details that are omitted early on that, later, become very important; there are a few red herrings, but they feel authentic because we're experiencing them along with our unreliable narrator. Hawkins is given the task of making her narrator remember something that happened when she was blacked out, and she handles the flashback this deftly; the twist at the end was wholly satisfying for me, and, even if I didn't highlight any passages of prose like I did with Gone Girl, this was a great read.

Emily Blunt

from Epiphany in Baltimore http://ift.tt/1mmATXo Book Review: Girl on the Train - Entrepreneur Generations

Posted by Entrepreneur Generations

Tweet