BookBin2016: The Girl on the Train

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I’ve done it again. I’ve gone and bought into hype and found it to be sorely lacking in satisfaction. So it goes with Paula Hawkins’s novel The Girl on the Train, which reviewers and fans led me to believe was a cracking page-turner with surprise twists left and right.

I twigged to the killer in the first quarter of the book, so that wasn’t compelling. Also, the novel lacked any sympathetic characters. There was a character I felt sorry for, but pity does not equal likability. I didn’t like any of the characters in this novel, and honestly found most of them utterly contemptible examples of humanity. Perhaps this is what we could dub Gone Girl syndrome. Talk about a book filled with utterly horrid, valueless people. This book wasn’t quite as bad, but I feel that Hawkins was perhaps striving to give us a similar level of questionable humanity. Guess she’s hoping for a movie deal.

Oh. Oh, look. They’re making a movie out of The Girl on the Train. And, wow, I would never have cast Emily Blunt in that role after having read the book. She is the antithesis of what that character should look like. But we can’t have an unattractive person anchoring a movie, now, can we? I do believe I shall avoid this with the same vigor with which I avoided the movie version of Gone Girl.

Final Verdict: Disappointing story. Satisfactory writing. Nice English flavour. Would never own this though. Back to the library.