The Girl on the Train has more fun with unreliable narration than any chiller since Gone Girl...Ms. Hawkins’s story has three women to narrate it. But Rachel, the main one, hits a new high in unreliability … Ms. Hawkins keeps all these fibs, threats and innuendoes swirling through her book, to the point where they frighten and undermine each of her characters. None of them really know which of the others can be trusted or believed … One sign of this book’s ingenuity is the way key details are effortlessly omitted. And you’re not apt to miss them until the denouement, when it is pointed out that certain characters never appeared and supposed facts were never explained.
Rachel might as well be wearing a sign that reads ‘Unreliable Narrator’ … It’s difficult to imagine any way these events could be rendered credible, but The Girl on the Train is further impaired by its narrative structure … The fact that Rachel’s first-person voice is so maddening — alternately imprecise and overtly declarative — doesn’t mitigate the reader’s frustration … Readers sometimes conflate the ‘likability’ of characters with a compulsion to care about their fate, but with a protagonist so determined to behave illogically, self-destructively and frankly narcissistically (someone even refers to her as ‘Nancy Drew’), it’s tough to root for Rachel.
The Girl on the Train is well-written and ingeniously constructed — perhaps a bit too ingeniously.The first-person narrator is now Rachel, now Anna, now Megan, and some of Megan’s soliloquies date from long before her disappearance — yet are strategically inserted between present-day chapters related by Rachel and Anna, making the reader feel a bit manipulated. But the portrait of Rachel as a chronic drunk who just might save herself by playing detective is rich and memorable.
When Megan goes missing, Rachel's world, already profoundly messy, shifts even farther off-center...Rachel finds herself unable to stay away, and winds up directly in the middle of the investigation, all while trying to deal with her growing addiction to alcohol and her frequent memory lapses … The novel is perfectly paced, from its arresting beginning to its twist ending; it's not an easy book to put down … What really makes The Girl on the Train such a gripping novel is Hawkins' remarkable understanding of the limits of human knowledge, and the degree to which memory and imagination can become confused.
Like its train, the story blasts through the stagnation of these lives in suburban London and the reader cannot help but turn pages. But there is a promise in the first half of the book of something deeper at work … Some of the strongest passages are when these two women are allowed to stop and think, to try to understand their own dilemmas and the ensuing ramifications, rather than being shoved forward along the tracks of the sleek plot. Here and there, especially as the book progresses, one craves to see and hear them as the distinct, recognizable women they are, rather than the types that they increasingly become … An absorbing read.
A walking, talking example of poor judgment, Rachel inserts herself into the case of the missing woman, Megan, who picks up the narration game … Girl on the Train is populated with characters who veer between unlikable and repulsive … Train takes a while to get rolling, but once it does, hang on tight. You'll be surprised by what horrors lurk around the bend.
The Girl on the Train isn’t sexy and broken like the other bad girls of popular lit … Investing in narrators who aren’t just unreliable but often hard to like isn’t always easy. First-time novelist Paula Hawkins is playing a long game, though, and she pulls off a thriller’s toughest trick: carefully assembling everything we think we know, until it reveals the one thing we didn’t see coming.
