Right off the bat, I have to
say that I loved this book. However, I have to admit that I’ve kind of been
dreading writing this review since The
Girl on the Train is a mystery novel. When it comes to books in the mystery
genre, I think it’s really important for the reader to be surprised by the book
and all of its twists and turns when they’re reading it. Personally, I was
really surprised by some of the plot twists in The Girl on the Train, and I would hate rob people of the chance to
also be surprised by this book.
When it comes to the people
that I’ve encountered online who have said that they didn’t like The Girl on the Train, I’d say that the
most common reason people give as to why they didn’t like this book is because
none of the characters are entirely likable. I’d say that’s a perfectly valid
reason for somebody to not like a book, TV show, or a movie. After reading the
book, I have to say that I definitely agree with the assessment that none of
characters in this book are truly likable, and I can see why that would cause
people to not like this book.
Personally, a book, TV show
or a movie having characters that aren’t necessarily very likable doesn’t
always cause me to not enjoy it. I think a story featuring unlikable characters
can still be very enjoyable, especially in the hands of good writers, and if
the characters are intentionally being written as unlikable or bad people. For example,
when it comes to my favorite TV shows, my favorite comedy is without question It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. All
of the characters on that show are written as being rather horrible people,
with Dennis quite possibly being a sociopath, and yet that’s a big part of the
show’s appeal when it comes to people who like the show. A critic actually once
described It’s Always Sunny in
Philadelphia as being, “Seinfeld on crack”. As someone who’s also a big fan
of Seinfeld and was never bothered by
the fact that Jerry, George, Elaine and Kramer were all rather selfish and
horrible people, I think that’s the perfect way to describe It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia in
just one sentence, but I digress.
What can cause me to not
like a TV show, movie, or this case a book, that has characters that aren’t
very likable people, is when the characters aren’t written with the intention
of being viewed by the reader as a bad or unlikable person. If they just end up
coming across as being extremely unlikable due to bad writing, that can really
ruin a TV show, movie, or a book for me. When I think about fictional characters
coming across as being unlikable people due bad writing, the first examples
that I always think of these days would be Ana Steele and Christian Grey from
the Fifty Shades trilogy and Grey: Fifty Shades of Grey as Told by
Christian by E.L. James. While I’m not 100% certain, I’m pretty sure that
E.L. James didn’t write the Fifty Shades
trilogy and Grey: Fifty Shades of Grey as
Told by Christian with the intention of Ana and Christian being viewed by
the reader as horrible and annoying people. That just happened because E.L.
James is a terrible writer. To be fair, if you’ve read my review of Grey: Fifty Shades of Grey as Told by Christian, then it should be clear that I actually liked Ana in
that book and the book itself.
Going back to The Girl on the Train, even though I
would consider this book to be an ensemble piece, Rachel is essentially the
main character of book since she’s the titular “Girl on the Train”. Rachel is
also the most likable and sympathetic character in the book, in my humble
opinion. She’s also really down on her luck throughout the book. Her husband,
Tom, left her for a woman named Anna that he had an affair with while they were
still married. Tom and Anna are now married and have a daughter named Evie.
It’s pretty clear that Rachel is a full-blown alcoholic right from the
beginning of the book. Rachel got fired from her job in public relations after
she got drunk while she was having lunch with a very important client, ruining
the deal in the process. Rachel now spends her days riding the train, and
there’s a couple that lives in a house near the house that she and Tom lived in
when they were married. Rachel becomes deeply invested in the couple, despite
the fact that she’s never even met them, and she doesn’t even know what their
names are. One of the main driving forces of the book is the fact that Rachel
has really taken the game or the concept of people watching to the extreme when
it comes to how she feels about the couple that she observes every time the
train goes by their house.
Since Rachel has never
actually met the couple, she refers to them as “Jess and Jason”, and imagines
them as having the perfect life. When the story changes to “Jess’” point of
view, it’s revealed that her name is actually Megan, while “Jason” is actually
Scott, and their marriage is far from perfect. That being said, I have to say
that I also really like Megan, because I thought that she was an incredibly
fascinating character. I feel like I should also mention that Megan came across
to me as being the kind of character that you would have expected to see on
Desperate Housewives. Megan by her own admission has given Scott reason to not completely
trust her in the past, and he definitely seems to genuinely have trouble
trusting her throughout the book.
Much like Rachel, Megan is
also not an entirely likable person. However, what got me feeling invested in
Megan as a character is the fact that she has a great deal of complexity to
her. She suffers from anxiety, which leads her to see a therapist, and I also
have to wonder if she suffers from depression. That’s something that’s never
confirmed or disproven though. As far as the characters’ backstories go, I’d
say that Megan’s backstory is the most interesting. That being said, I don’t
really want to go into any specifics about her past, because I feel like that
might take away from people’s enjoyment of the book.
While I never thought that
the story was genuinely boring or slow, what really gets the story going, and
kicks things into high gear is the fact that one day Rachel sees Megan kissing
another man. Because she has become so invested in Megan and Scott’s lives,
this upsets her greatly, and it definitely plays a part in Rachel, Megan and
Anna’s lives slowly starting to collide with one another’s.
The only time the fact that
none of characters in the book are truly likable people started to really annoy
me and really pissed me off were the parts that were written from Anna’s point
of view. In a book where the two other main characters really had some depth
and complexity to them, Anna really stood out as one of the book’s biggest
weaknesses like a sore thumb. The reason the character Anna stands out as one
of the book’s flaws is because she’s a very one-dimensional character with
nothing to make the reader like her or care about her once she’s formally
introduced. Perhaps this will seem like a bizarre thing to mention, but when it
comes to how I feel about Anna, one thing that came to mind as I was reading the
book and my thoughts regarding Anna changed as the story progressed was the TV
show Grey’s Anatomy and Meredith
Grey’s line about Penny, the doctor that “killed” Derek from the episode “Guess
Who’s Coming to Dinner”, which aired a few weeks ago, “Now she’s a person.”
Despite the fact that I knew
that Anna was essentially a home wrecker for having an affair with Tom, I still
found myself having a certain amount of sympathy for her before she was formally
introduced in the book. Whenever Tom called Rachel to tell her how much she was
upsetting Anna by constantly calling them, it really made me wonder what it
must be like for any one who marries somebody that’s been married before and
has an ex-husband or an ex-wife that’s still hung up on them and refuses to
leave their ex and his or her new family alone. However, as soon as I got to
the first chapter that was written from Anna’s point of view, I immediately
lost all sympathy that I had had for Anna once I saw what she was really like. For
some reason, it was a lot easier for me to humanize Anna and feel sorry for her
before I got to the first chapter that was written from her point of view.
Unfortunately, seeing what she was actually like and seeing what a horrible
person she was quickly made me stop feeling any sort of compassion for her.
After all, she seems to feel absolutely no shame or remorse for the pain that
she and Tom caused Rachel by having an affair while Tom and Rachel were still
married.
Given how shallow and
self-centered Anna is, I’m honestly really surprised that she’d have any desire
to have kids and be mom. While I’m not a parent myself, I still know that being
a parent often requires a great deal of time and sacrifice. Anna just doesn’t
strike me as the type of person who would realistically want to make the
sacrifices that come with being a parent. While Rachel by her own admission
hadn’t exactly made life easy for Tom when they were married and were trying to
have a baby, I’m still completely and utterly baffled when it comes to trying
to understand what Tom ever saw in Anna that made him want to leave Rachel for
her.
There’s nothing about Anna’s
personality or the way she treats Tom throughout the book that makes me think
it was the way she treated him that initially drew him to her when they started
having an affair. If you ask me, while Rachel definitely has a lot of problems,
I still think that she’s a better person than Anna is. If the way Rachel was
handling their unsuccessful attempts at trying to have a baby made dealing with
her feel like a burden to Tom, then I’m even more confused as to why he thought
that Anna was any better than Rachel. If you ask me, Anna seems like she would
be even more of an insufferable handful for Tom to deal with than Rachel does.
However, as the book continued, it became more and more clear to me that Tom
was also pretty messed up and not somebody that I’d want the best for.
The story itself had really
great pacing and never really dragged in my opinion. The only parts of the book
that were hard for me to get through were the chapters that were written from
Anna’s point of view. That was pretty much due to the fact that Anna ended up
being the character that I hated the most out of all the characters in the book,
as soon as I read the first chapter that was written from her point of view. What
I think really helped the pacing and the flow of the story is the fact that all
of the chapters were relatively short. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t necessarily
have a problem with books having somewhat long chapters, but I do think that
sometimes a book having lots of long chapters can hurt a book more than help
it.
For example, the
aforementioned Grey: Fifty Shades of Grey
as Told by Christian has some absurdly long chapters, and I’m honestly a
little surprised that the people who edited the book didn’t insist that E.L.
James break the chapters into smaller chunks. In case anybody reading this
review hasn’t read Grey: Fifty Shades of
Grey as Told by Christian, I feel like should mention that that book
doesn’t have chapters in the traditional sense. Unlike the original Fifty Shades trilogy, each “chapter” of
that book is simply labeled with a date. Much like that book, The Girl on the Train also doesn’t have
chapters in the traditional sense. Each “chapter” is labeled with a date and
the name of which characters’ point of view that the chapter is being told from
whenever the story changes to a different character’s point of view. I have to
say that I think that it was very smart of Paula Hawkins to include the
characters’ names and the date at the start of each chapter since the book has
three main characters, and the timeline of the book isn’t told in a linear
manner. Doing that definitely helps keep the reader from getting confused and
having a hard time following the story.
As I said at the beginning
of this review, I’m really trying to not give away too many spoilers in case
anybody that reads this review hasn’t read the book yet. I wouldn’t want to
ruin this book for anybody, especially since The Girl on the Train is a mystery novel. While the mystery genre
is a genre of books that I’ve only gotten into fairly recently by reading J.K.
Rowling/Robert Galbraith’s Cormoran
Strike series, I still think it’s extremely important for the plot of a
mystery novel to not be incredibly predictable and that the reader should be
genuinely surprised by the book. I really think that me going into too much
detail and giving away too many spoilers in my review for The Girl on the Train or any mystery novel would be a very bad
thing for me to do. That being said, this book has a lot of really great plot
twists in my opinion. Plus, I felt like Hawkins did a great job of having
Rachel, Megan and Anna’s lives eventually collide with each other’s.
At the risk of giving too
much away, aside from finding Anna extremely annoying and unlikable, the other
thing that bugged me about The Girl on
the Train was the way things ended for Rachel. All throughout the book, I
was really rooting for her to stop drinking and for her to get her shit
together. Unfortunately, while the book’s ending makes it seem like she’s
finally stopped drinking because it’s mentioned that she hadn’t had a drink in
21 days, it’s also heavily implied that she’s ready to have a drink as soon as
the book ends, which really, really, really pisses me off.
One last thing that I would
like to mention is that if you’re planning to read The Girl on the Train, or you’re currently reading it, I would
highly recommend checking out the audiobook version of The Girl on the Train instead of just reading an actual physical
copy of the book. I didn’t buy a physical copy of the book to read, I only
bought the audiobook version of The Girl
on the Train and just listened to it like I’ve done with almost every other
book that I’ve reviewed so far. The three women that did the audiobook, Clare
Corbett (Rachel), Louise Brealey (Megan) and India Fisher (Anna) all did a
truly phenomenal job of bringing the characters to life and making a book that
was already amazing even better. I know this might sound weird to some people,
but India Fisher’s reading of Anna reminded me a lot of the character Alexis
Carrington from the TV show Dynasty
and the way Joan Collins played the role of Alexis; but then again, that might
just be because I had been watching Dynasty
episodes during the same period of time that I was reading The Girl on the Train. As much as I hate the character Anna, India
Fisher did a fantastic job of portraying her in the audiobook version of The Girl on the Train.
All things considered, I
loved this book, and I think that The
Girl on the Train deserves all of the success and hype that it has gotten. I’ll
definitely be checking out any books that Paula Hawkins writes in the future. While
this book might not necessarily be everybody’s cup of tea, especially if
they’re leery about books where none of the characters are truly likable
people, I’d definitely recommend reading The
Girl on the Train. With the exception of Anna, all of the characters felt
very complex and interesting to me. The overall plot and mystery of the book
kept me invested in the story, and the story itself had really great pacing
that never caused me to feel like reading this book was a major chore for me
like Life and Death: Twilight Reimagined did, which makes me extremely happy when it comes to how I
feel about this book.
That being said, my final score
for The Girl on the Train is 8 out of
10.
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