Just Finished Reading Paula Hawkins' The Girl on the Train

Usually, each Sunday morning while I'm perusing the "Life" section of my Gainesville Sun newspaper in search of the Sunday Jumble puzzle, I browse through the weekly New York Times bestseller list. For several months ongoing, Paula Hawkins has had her novel The Girl on the Train on it...it occurred to me that this would be a book worth looking into.  So I checked it out from the library and just finished reading it: I'm glad I did...

The Girl on the Train is a mystery "whodunit" set in the present time in London.  Rachel, an embittered divorcee whose ex-husband Tom had left her for another woman, Anna, is heavily dependent on alcohol as she makes her daily train rides from her apartment to and from downtown London.  Along the way at a special point in the route, she can look out the train window and see the street where she and Tom used to live.  Four doors down the street from her old home, there is another couple that she becomes accustomed to observing...she dubs them "Jason" and "Jesse" and imagines that they have an idyllic, perfect marriage.  The story takes off into a suspenseful mystery when she discovers their true identities, Scott and Megan...as well as their troubled lives...

If you ever saw the old early 1950s Alfred Hitchcock movie Rear Window starring Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly, you might get a feel for this novel.  The protagonist in each case is something of a vicarious voyeur, peering into the lives of others who are...at least initially...unaware that they are being watched.  And in each story, there is a disappearance, with the hero/heroine struggling to convince others that there is something wrong going on.  I assure you that the ending of The Girl on the Train, like Rear Window, is very exciting and climactic...

Reading The Girl on the Train, because of its setting in England and its depiction of life there, reminds me of another book I've recently undertaken: Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling's venture into more "adult" literature, titled The Casual Vacancy.  But whereas Rowling, in my opinion, muddled up her story by introducing too many characters early on, Hawkins kept the numbers of players in her drama to a minimum...very smart.  Instead, she examined the events through the eyes of three people: Rachel, Megan, and Anna.  By doing this, the author was able to probe more deeply into their feelings and motivations, making The Girl on the Train a good psychological mystery...

The word is out that filming is underway for a film adaptation to The Girl on the Train and that it is scheduled for release some time late in 2016.  But I would recommend reading the book first: because of the extensive introspection of the main characters, I suspect that a lot may be lost in the translation of this interesting story to the screen...