Traveling over Thanksgiving left me with plenty of time to be bored in the airport. Wanting to abate this boredom, I turned to the bookstore in search of something I could read. My options were limited, but I did end up finding a book that appeared intriguing: “The Girl on the Train” by Paula Hawkins.
“The Girl on the Train” follows Rachel, an alcoholic divorcee, through a series of events that lead to her involvement in the case of a missing person named Megan. Megan happens to be acquaintances with Rachel’s ex-husband and his new wife, which is a pretty significant fact in this book, because it is Megan’s proximity to Rachel’s ex-husband that really gets her tangled up in everything.
It’s aptly named, I have to give it that: Rachel spends most of the book either on a train, getting off of a train or thinking about things she saw while she was on the train. The rest of the time, she’s either drinking or meddling in things that don’t concern her in the slightest. Honestly, hardly anything happened in this book. And the things that did happen (the entire mystery plot, for instance) were incredibly predictable and not all that interesting.
I don’t think any of this would have bothered me as much had Rachel not been such an unlikable character. Obviously, she’s going through a lot in this book — she’s struggling with alcoholism, freshly unemployed, doesn’t have a house, is broke, friendless and super obsessed with her ex-husband (who she stalks constantly). That being said, I hated her so much by the time I had finished the book that I couldn’t even feel bad for her. First of all, she never should have been involved in the investigation of Megan’s disappearance to begin with. She never knew Megan personally, but through a little bit of stalking (her ex-husband) and a few instances of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, Rachel ends up getting herself directly involved in the investigation. In fact, she even becomes a suspect due to her reckless behavior and stupidity.
Since the book was told mainly from Rachel’s perspective, a lot of things ended up being revealed to the reader by way of Rachel’s thoughts. The thing that was so infuriating about this was that even though Rachel witnessed some crucial events, she couldn’t even remember them because she had blacked out after drinking too much. And after suffering through about 300 pages of Hawkins dangling Rachel’s forgotten memory in front of us, the big reveal of who the murderer was wasn’t even worth it. It was so predictable, it wasn’t satisfying at all.
Occasionally, a chapter was told from the perspective of either Megan (the woman who went missing) or Rachel’s ex-husband’s new wife, Anna. It was painfully obvious that the addition of these other characters’ perspectives only existed to advance the plot, but it also had the unintended effect of making me want to stop reading. Somehow, these two characters ended up being even more unlikable than Rachel, a feat I thought impossible. The fact that this book had not one, but three astonishingly awful narrators made it near impossible to get through, and I wouldn’t have continued had I not been on an airplane with a dead phone and no charger. It wasn’t just the three narrators, either. Literally every single character in this book is the worst. I have never consumed a piece of media with worse characters. The real mystery of “The Girl on the Train” was how Hawkins managed to create a cast of characters that were so consistently and sensationally awful.
I would not recommend “The Girl on the Train.” Even if it’s the last book on the shelf, don’t pick it up. There weren’t any redeeming qualities — everything, even down to the sentence structure, was infuriatingly bad. If you’re bored at the airport, it’d be better to just sleep. Save your $11.45.
“The Girl on the Train”: ☆☆☆☆☆
