"The Girl on the Train" by Paula Hawkins

The best books are the ones that you pick up and cannot seem to put it down until you’ve read it from start to finish. That is exactly what happened when I started reading “The Girl on the Train” by Paula Hawkins. It has been labeled as the next “Gone Girl” due to its similar surprising twists and turns throughout the novel. What I really enjoyed about this book was the way it alternated points of view between three women, giving you the opportunity to get to know these characters even though they were so different (yet so intertwined in each other’s lives).

The book is centered on 32-year-old Rachel Watson and the obsession she has with a couple she notices while going to work on a train. I say "going to work," but in reality, she has been fired for months and still rides the train into town. Yes, this woman is a bit strange, and we notice that from the very beginning. She drinks multiple gin and tonics on the way to town everyday, still struggling to fight her alcoholism. As her life continues to go downhill because of a divorce, she becomes attached with the couple she sees and even makes up names for them. One day she realizes that the woman she always looks at, Megan, is missing, and Rachel bizarrely decides to figure out where she went.

Even though this book bounces around the three different women, Rachel is the main focus of the story. She comprises the majority of the “pre-missing” section, and it’s quite simple to become attached to her and the horrible things she has gone through in her life. I almost felt for her at the times when she would call her ex-husband, Tom, trying everything to get him back. Unfortunately for Rachel,  she finds out that he was cheating on her and then decided to stay in the house they lived in together with his former mistress, Anna. It is a weird turn of events, and it really puts it into perspective of what a struggle Rachel is having with her life.

As the novel unfolds, it is a total mystery as to what happened to Megan and I was left guessing every few pages. Is she dead? Did she run away? Could it be something as silly as going on vacation but Rachel, being the drunk that she is, has an alternate reality? It sounds a bit farfetched, but with how the story was being told, I had no idea. Almost every character in the story was a possible culprit to me, and I will honestly say that I had no idea the ending would be as crazy as it was. Even after hearing comparisons to “Gone Girl,” I finished the last few pages and dropped the book with my mouth open because it was so shocking.

This book definitely goes down as one of the better books I’ve read in recent years, and one that I would recommend to anyone who has a few hours to kill. It isn’t a long book, only about 300 pages, and can easily be done in one day if you put your mind to it. The only issues I had were the way the book jumped around at times. Sometimes it was a bit confusing when the point of view would change to Rachel present-day and then Megan from two years ago. Even with the dates listed at the start of the chapter, I had to give my mind a second to get into the right setting of what is going on.