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The Girl on the Train

Paula Hawkins

Why we're reading this: This is a great read; practically unputdownable during the holidays when I should have been doing baking …more
[close] This is a great read; practically unputdownable during the holidays when I should have been doing baking and wrapping!

There are 3 central female characters: Rachel, Megan, and Anna. Rachel is an alcoholic who takes the train to work everyday and passes by Megan & Scott's home, which happens to be just down the road from where Rachel used to live. Currently, Rachel's ex-husband Tom lives there with his new wife Anna and their baby Evie. Rachel has created a fantasy about Megan & Scott's perfect life, but she sees something one day that causes her to worry about Megan's safety and then Megan disappears. A very unreliable narrator, Rachel suffers from black-outs and can't quite remember her behavior or what transpires while she is drinking. Unable to let the mystery of Megan's disappearance go, Rachel sets out to discover what really happened and everyone's life will be affected.

This is a fun, quick thriller that does not disappoint! Highly recommended for all who enjoy psychological thrillers.

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Dec 24, 2014 Mary rated it really liked it

Shelves: advance-readers-copy, mystery, missing-persons, marriage, divorce, edelweiss, unputdownable

The Girl on the Train, by Paula Hawkins

This is a great read; practically unputdownable during the holidays when I should have been doing baking and wrapping!
There are 3 central female characters: Rachel, Megan, and Anna. Rachel is an alcoholic who takes the train to work everyday and passes by Megan & Scott's home, which happens to be just down the road from where Rachel used to live. Currently, Rachel's ex-husband Tom lives there with his new wife Anna and their baby Evie. Rachel has created a ...more

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Jan 26, 2015 Toni Moore rated it liked it

Shelves: reviewed, kindle, fiction, 2015-books-read

That author Paula Hawkins was a journalist is evident from her writing style. Much of the "action" in "The Girl on the Train" is observation. Rachel, the main character, has lost everything meaningful in her life -- first the ability to conceive a baby, then her husband and her marriage, and finally her job. She finds refuge in alcohol, drinking canned gin and tonics as she rides a commuter train back and forth from her rented room in a London suburb to the city. The gin and tonics get her throu That author Paula Hawkins was a journalist is evident from her writing style. Much of the "action" in "The Girl on the Train" is observation. Rachel, the main character, has lost everything meaningful in her life -- first the ability to conceive a baby, then her husband and her marriage, and finally her job. She finds refuge in alcohol, drinking canned gin and tonics as she rides a commuter train back and forth from her rented room in a London suburb to the city. The gin and tonics get her through her days; bottles of wine take her through her nights. Alcohol dulls the pain of her losses, but it's destroying what's left of her personality. Rachel continues to ride the train each day because she doesn't want to tell her landlord, a female friend from college, that she's lost her job.

From her seat on the commuter train, Rachel sees into the back yards (or gardens, as they’re called in England) of the houses the train passes. At one place where the train often stops for a while, Rachel notices a young couple who drink their coffee outside on the patio in the morning and sometimes have wine in the afternoon when Rachel is returning to her friend's house. As it turns out, their house is just a few doors away from the house where Rachel lived with her husband, Tom, until he divorced her after she started drinking heavily when fertility treatments didn't work. To Rachel, "Jason and Jess" -- her made-up names for the couple -- have a perfect life, a life like she used to have.

Then, one day Rachel sees Jess embrace and kiss a strange man, definitely not Jason. Rachel is incensed -- how could Jess do such a thing -- and she becomes obsessed by the incident. She's distracted and wants to tell Jason about it. The next day, a Saturday, Rachel decides to get off the train at Witney, her old neighborhood, and go see Jason. She knows this is a bad idea, because she has been warned away from Tom and his new wife, Anna, and their new baby. Rachel has been calling Tom late at night; she even showed up at the house one day, picked up the baby, and took it outside while Anna was sleeping. Anna is angry and terrified of what Rachel might do. She's ready to call the police about what she sees as Rachel's harassment.

Rachel goes to a pub and has several drinks before she gets on the train; she's drunk by the time she gets off at Witney. Late Sunday morning, Rachel wakes up in her bed in her rented room; she's hung-over and sick, and she can't recall anything that happened after she got off the train at Witney. The next day, Rachel sees a newspaper and finds out that "Jess" is Megan Hipwell, who has been missing since Saturday evening. Megan left the house after having a huge fight with her husband, Scott. Rachel knows that she saw something or did something that Saturday evening in Witney, but she blacked out – Rachel has no memory of whatever it was.

The three main female characters narrate the story: Rachel, Megan, and Anna. Each chapter is told from one of their viewpoints; it's as if you're hearing their internal monologue. You know what each woman knows -- no more, no less. But you gradually realize that the women are not telling you everything they know. They are unreliable narrators; they see the past and the present through their own biases and desires, as they want to see it.

From the beginning, I was captivated by Rachel's voice; I didn't always like her and sometimes I wanted to slap her or yell at her to snap out of her self-pity and stop her self-destruction by way of alcohol. Rachel -- and Megan and Anna -- observe what's happening around them and to them -- what they "see" is what you, as a reader, "get." But this transparency is deceptive; more is going on below the superficial observation of events.

Trains and train tracks are key elements of the story, providing metaphors for life's journey and tying a couple of the characters together. For a change, the main characters are strong, if flawed, women, and the men are secondary characters. The unreliability and mutability of memory also play large parts in this suspenseful novel. It's a quick and satisfying read, and the ending is realistic, not pat. "The Girl on the Train" is definitely worth reading.
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Mar 05, 2015 Andie rated it liked it

A cross between Gone Girl and the old 1944 movie "Gaslight," this book is well written, but like Gone Girl is singularly lacking any character that I liked - even a little bit - which definitely diminished my enjoyment of the book. ...more

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