I’m going to be honest with y’all, I heard about The Girl on the Train through a recommendation on Reese Witherspoon’s instagram page. I figure if she is making Big Little Lies into an HBO miniseries and produced last year’s Gone Girl she must have pretty good literary taste. And she does!
There are a lot of comparisons between The Girl on the Train and Gone Girl floating around and they aren’t incorrect. There are multiple narratives told by unreliable narrators with a missing woman at the center of the plot. The key difference is that there are three women telling the story and our primary point of view, Rachel, is unreliable because she is a raging alcoholic not because she is sociopath. Hawkins does a great job at creating plot twists and red herrings that both frustrate you and keep you guessing.
Our three narrators are Rachel- who lost her husband, Tom, to another woman. She also struggles with alcoholism stemming from her inability to get pregnant. She constantly calls Tom and spends her days riding the train that goes behind her old house, since she lost her job after showing up to work drunk. Anna is the woman Tom was having an affair with, they have since married and had a child. Megan is Tom & Anna’s neighbor who goes missing; Rachel is able to see Megan from the train tracks and sees something from the window shortly before Megan’s disappearance. She was in a troubled marriage with a man named Scott and was having an affair. All five people overlap during the events of the story.
None of these woman are particularly sympathetic. Rachel has had a hard time following her divorce but she brought a lot of it onto herself. You’re tempted to care for Megan because she is missing but between the affair and some other details from her past that are uncovered you lose your sympathy. Anna is just kind of a bitch, sorry.
It’s hard to give a thorough review of a psychological thriller without giving too much away but I can assure you it is a must read for Gillian Flynn fans.
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