The Girl On The Train by Paula Hawkins

We have decided to start writing short book reviews every now and then just because I love books and to bring some variety to the blog. These will only be short reviews, and eventually we also hope to write short film reviews. Today I am going to review The Girl On The Train by Paula Hawkins.... 

The comparisons to one of my all-time favourite psychological thriller novels Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, are inevitable, and therefore I knew I had to read this. It tells the story of Rachel, whom everyday gets the same commuter train and notices the houses beside the track as the train stops at a signal, giving her enough time to get glimpses in to other people's lives. To pass away the time and boredom of commuting, she creates names for some of the people living in the houses and imagines what their lives are like.

Rachel becomes focused on a young couple living in one of the houses she passes and to the outside world they look like the perfect couple, until one day Rachel notices something suspicious, and it's there that the story really begins. The reader is then placed in the hands of a series of unreliable narrators as it tells the story from various perspectives. Relying on unreliable narrators, works to keep the reader guessing and never fully trusting what we are being told. This book is therefore very clever. 

I found that I could not put down this book, I wanted to keep reading to find out what happened and for a debut novel, this is very impressive. It manages to create a lot of tension and atmosphere in a short space of time, like an Alfred Hitchcock film. I thought that it slightly lost it halfway through, and it appeared to be going round in circles as the main narrator Rachel was unsure which memories were real and which her mind had simply created. But apart from that, I really enjoyed this book. This is a brilliant debut psychological thriller, which I highly recommend and I wish every book I picked up was as exciting as this! 

Jen

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