The Most Popular Bestsellers Books - Thriller - Paula Hawkins's The Girl on the Train Info, Plot Summary, Review and Paula Hawkins Biography
Author: Paula Hawkins
Book: The Girl on the Train (320 Pgs.)
Rachel takes the same commuter train every morning. 
Paula Hawkins: The Girl on the Train
Paula Hawkins: The Girl on the Train - Review
Reviewed by Robert J. Wiersema
For Rachel, the central character of Paula Hawkins’ debut thriller The Girl on the Train, routine has become drudgery. Every morning she rides the same train into London, every evening the same train home. Weekends are little more than “forty-eight empty hours to fill”, Monday morning a relief.
But Rachel has some small coping strategies to assist her with the daily grind. Drinking helps, though she finds “it’s less acceptable to drink on the train on a Monday” than her cans of gin-and-tonics on a Friday afternoon.
And then there’s number 15 Blenheim Road.
Every day, Rachel waits keenly for the train to be stopped by a faulty signal, which affords her an opportunity to study the trackside yard of the cozy two-storey house and to check in with its inhabitants. She has created full lives for the seemingly golden couple at No. 15, whom she calls “Jason” and “Jess” as she unfolds their perfect, loving, connected days in her mind.
Their life, as Rachel imagines it, is a stark contrast, it turns out, to her own past just down the block at 23 Blenheim Road, where she lived with her husband. Where her now ex-husband lives with his new wife, Anna, and his new child.
Rachel, it quickly emerges, is dealing with more than mere commuter drudgery. There’s the divorce, yes, but also the tiny bedroom she rents from an acquaintance who has a tendency to not mind her own business, the late-night messages she leaves on her ex-husband’s phone, the constant drinking and the occasional blackouts.
And when “Jess”, whose real name is Megan, disappears, shortly after Rachel saw her in the backyard of No. 15 in an intimate embrace with a mysterious stranger, Rachel is drawn back into Blenheim Street, into a world of secrets and lies where she may be a key participant, not just a trackside voyeur.
London-based Hawkins, who has worked as a journalist, demonstrates a particular skill with the slow revelation of character. The Girl on the Train is told in three first-person voices, those of Rachel, Megan and Anna. While each voice is distinctive and unguarded, the characters of the three women develop in the spaces between what they say about themselves, and what other characters say or reveal about them: there is a certain amount of honesty in the self-awareness, but more in the steady dismantling of self-delusions and the removal of facades.
Most of the increase of the tension in the novel is dependent upon this gradual revelation. When it becomes known, for example, that Rachel was on Blenheim Road the night that Megan disappeared, she is drawn into the investigation; the fact that she was drunk to the point of blacking out, and has no memory of the evening, ratchets up the uncertainty still higher.
Not every novel needs to be profound or life changing, to do new things with genre conventions.
This grace and skill with character revelation, unfortunately, does not extend to the male characters of The Girl on the Train. Where the three female protagonists are well developed, Hawkins’s male characters are little more than caricatures, lacking depth and development. This is – perhaps – understandable, in that the reader is wholly dependent upon the female narrators, each with their own expectations, preconceptions and illusions, for the development of the male characters, but the approach structurally weakens the novel.
As the tension peaks and should tip over into suspense (the ‘thrill’ part of a good thriller), the novel seems to lose momentum. The careful twists and turns of the earlier pages, in which the reader has come to know the female characters, give way to creaking, predictable revelations and machinations that pale against what has come before. Where the reader should be perched on the edge of their seat, they will instead find a certain comfortable familiarity. Yes, there are twists in how the novel ultimately resolves, but nothing that genuinely surprises.
And that’s all right: not every novel needs to be profound or life changing, to do new things with genre conventions. Some novels serve just as well as diversions, reading experiences that will enthrall and entertain, say, for the length of a train ride, of one’s daily commute.
2015@http://albbookspreviews.blogspot.pt-Top Bestsellers Books - Paula Hawkins-The Girl on the Train
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