Just Finished Reading Into the Water by Paula Hawkins

Back in 2015 I read Paula Hawkins' psychological thriller The Girl on the Train, which was later made into a hit movie...here's a link to my review of that novel: [Girl on Train].  I've just finished reading her follow-up book, Into the Water, from 2017.  The setting is a rural northern England town where a winding river flows, with a bend of it forming a pool of water, nicknamed the Drowning Pool, lying under a high cliff. It's a cliff with a reputation for murder and suicide...chiefly of women...over the centuries.  And just this year it has claimed two more victims, each one apparently making the fatal leap "into the water" voluntarily.  The latest victim's sister, Jules, arrives in town from London to care for Nel's orphaned teenage daughter Lena, who is hostile to her (and the world in general) on a number of levels.  Jules herself has barely-submerged issues with her late sister going back to childhood, and the author fully airs them out throughout the story.  Lena's best friend Katie was the other suicide, and the mystery of its cause as well as that of Nel's demise apparently weren't enough to complicate the story as Hawkins then delves into the death of another women in the pool some two decades earlier.  The story, ostensibly about what happened on the cliff and what or who caused the deaths, progresses into a character study of life in this community from the viewpoint of many different people, each one either directly or peripherally involved with the ongoing mysteries...

I found Into the Water a bit unsettling as it reminded me more, not of Hawkins' The Girl on the Train, but rather J.K. Rowling's "adult" novel The Casual Vacancy, which like this book examined the attitudes...from their own perspectives...of an English town full of its own problems.   Into the Water is loaded with angry exchanges full of angst, accusations, and misunderstandings as we see that just about everyone involved is, to a great extent, broken and dysfunctional in their abilities and willingness to relate to each other.  They seem totally immersed in their respective pasts and have lost any awareness of the fact that the present should also be an important part of their lives.  This was unpleasant to read, yet in my opinion it was to the author's credit that she wrote like this because it reflects how so many people around us stagger through their lives obsessed with the burdens of bygone slights and regrets.  Still, if you're looking for a mystery thriller like The Girl on the Train you're bound to be disappointed with this one.  I'm glad I read it, and Paula Hawkins is excellent with her character development.  To any prospective readers I say go for it, but be prepared to get a bit muddled with all the characters...