BOOK REVIEW: Into the Water, by Paula Hawkins

BOOK REVIEW: Into the Water, by Paula HawkinsTitle: Into the Water by Paula Hawkins
Published by Riverhead Books
Published: May 2nd 2017
Genres: Fiction
Pages: 386
Format: Trade Paper
Source: Publisher
Goodreads

A single mother turns up dead at the bottom of the river that runs through town. Earlier in the summer, a vulnerable teenage girl met the same fate. They are not the first women lost to these dark waters, but their deaths disturb the river and its history, dredging up secrets long submerged.
Left behind is a lonely fifteen-year-old girl. Parentless and friendless, she now finds herself in the care of her mother's sister, a fearful stranger who has been dragged back to the place she deliberately ran from—a place to which she vowed she'd never return.
With the same propulsive writing and acute understanding of human instincts that captivated millions of readers around the world in her explosive debut thriller, The Girl on the Train, Paula Hawkins delivers an urgent, twisting, deeply satisfying read that hinges on the deceptiveness of emotion and memory, as well as the devastating ways that the past can reach a long arm into the present.
Beware a calm surface—you never know what lies beneath.

 Some say the women left something of themselves in the water; some say it retains some of their power, for ever since then it has drawn to its shores the unlucky, the desperate, the unhappy, the lost. They come here to swim with their sisters.

This summer I am participating in Book Sparks‘s Summer Reading Challenge, and the first book of the summer is Paula Hawkins’s Into the Water. I have been eagerly waiting to read this after reading The Girl on the Train last year, and I feel like she met my expectations with her sophomore novel. Into the Water is a slower-paced novel compared to the runaway feeling that I got while reading The Girl on the Train, and I think that the pace and atmosphere of each book fits the title. Into the Water unfolds slowly through multiple perspectives and all of the details float around until the final few chapters when everything comes together.

Into the Water‘s strength lies not in the driving force of the plot but in its undercurrent. The main plot revolves around the death of a single mother in a pool of water in which other women throughout the town’s history have also died. To me, the most interesting aspect of this novel is the history of that pool and the stories of the women who died there. I would have loved for the novel to revolve more around the histories of those women because their stories were nuanced, engaging, and compelling. I wanted to know more about the lives of those women and what led to their downfalls.

The major drawback for me in this novel are the narrators. I felt like there were too many narrators (eleven! I wrote the names down to keep track of them, and I’ve never felt like I’ve had to do that before), and that many narrators lead to a jumpy, sometimes jarring plot. I like stories with multiple perspectives, and I think eleven narrators can work if it’s a longer book or a longer series, but when a book is less than four-hundred pages, I find that eleven narrators eventually blur and lose their distinctions.

Overall, this is a solid read for me, and I breezed through it on a lovely spring day with my cat on my lap on our deck.

An advance reader’s copy was sent to me on behalf of Riverhead Books and Book Sparks for my honest opinion.

BOOK REVIEW: The Girl on the Train, by Paula Hawkins

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BOOK REVIEW: The Girl on the Train, by Paula HawkinsTitle: The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins
Published by Riverhead Books
Published: January 13th 2015
Genres: Fiction, Thriller
Pages: 336
Format: Trade Paper
Source: Work
Goodreads

The debut psychological thriller that will forever change the way you look at other people's lives.
EVERY DAY THE SAMERachel takes the same commuter train every morning and night. 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.
UNTIL TODAYAnd 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 goes to the police. But is she really as unreliable as they say? Soon she is deeply entangled not only in the investigation but in the lives of everyone involved. Has she done more harm than good?

 I once read a book by a former alcoholic where she described giving oral sex to two different men, men she’d just met in a restaurant on a busy London high street. I read it and I thought, I’m not that bad. This is where the bar is set.

I’ve had an ARC of this thanks to one of my jobs for almost two years, and I decided to finally get around to reading it before the film was released. I still haven’t seen the film yet, but I will eventually once it’s released on DVD as it’s not currently showing in any local theaters. This thriller doesn’t bring anything new or revolutionary to the genre as it follows a similar “Girl” novel twist following the rise in popularity of Gone Girl, but it is a heck of a page-turner.

The Girl on the Train follows the life of Rachel, a divorced and unemployed woman who takes the same train every day. Rachel sees the same couple almost every day and imagines a life for them. This imaginary life becomes another one of her escapes until something terrible happens and she gets herself involved.

Hawkins’s The Girl on the Train follows the lives of three women during a criminal investigation and the intertwining of those three lives with each of the other women. Each of three women are varied and complex and that adds a dimension to the novel that I didn’t expect.

The story is rather predictable in the end, especially as it’s called the “next Gone Girl,” but Hawkins’s writing style is engaging and I couldn’t put it down until I finished it!

(This book was provided for reading consideration as a perk of my job, and the freebie does not impact or influence my review in any way.)