Book Review: The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins

The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins
Publisher: Riverhead Books
Release Date: January 13, 2015
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Publisher’s Description:

Rachel takes the same commuter train every morning. 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.

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 offers what she knows to the police, and becomes inextricably entwined in what happens next, as well as in the lives of everyone involved. Has she done more harm than good?

Rachel is an alcoholic. She drinks so much that she often has blackouts. This makes her a very unreliable narrator. She also makes REALLY bad choices which makes her a very frustrating narrator. The kind I want to reach into the book and shake some sense into.

The other narrators are Anna and Megan. Anna is Rachel’s ex-husband Tom’s new wife. She loathes Rachel because some of Rachel’s bad choices involve drunkenly calling Tom or coming over to their house at all hours. Megan is Jess of Rachel’s fantasy couple that she watches from the train. I wouldn’t call Megan unreliable but she withholds a lot of shocking information from the reader.

When Megan goes missing, Rachel becomes obsessed with trying to solve the mystery of her disappearance. But how much help can a person who doesn’t even remember large blocks of her life really be? This book has so many twists and turns, I lost count. Just when I thought I had it all figured out, new information would come to light. I loved that I couldn’t trust Rachel and that neither one of us knew what really happened during her blackout periods and were kept guessing almost until the end.

This book has been called the next Gone Girl and I can see why. It has some of the same elements -a missing wife being the main one. However, whereas Gone Girl has The ONE BIG TWIST and then is just plain creepy after that, this book has a lot of little twists and not as much creepiness. I think it’s important to go into reading this with the right expectations. It’s a great thriller. But it’s not a carbon copy of Gone Girl (which I loved) and that’s a good thing. Highly recommended.

DreamWorks has recently acquired the movie rights to the book. I think this book would make a great movie and I hope the adaptation does it justice.