The Girl Needs an AA Meeting.

This the third or fourth book that I’ve managed to blaze through in a couple of days. I’m not sure if I’ve just been lucky with my book selection or I’ve got amazing commitment to Sparkle Motion/CBR8.

It’s difficult to read this book and not draw comparisons to Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl. Aside from the similar titles, both feature a story told from the point of view of multiple narrators and at least one narrator is unreliable. In the case of Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train, the main narrator is unreliable not because she is a lying sociopath, but because she is an alcoholic prone to blackout spells. It’s on the night of one of these blackouts, that another of the protagonists goes missing.

This book struck an emotional chord with me due to the fact that a good friend of mine recently checked himself into rehab because he was the same sort of alcoholic as Rachel, the main character. It was very frustrating to watch the same bad decisions, the same swearing off of alcohol only to backslide within a day or two and the general sloppiness that went along with it (my friend is 5 months sober and doing great BTW). The mystery that self isn’t particularly hard to figure out, but the story itself isn’t about just the whodunnit. It’s about the relationship between the three protagonists, the men in their lives and the way our perspectives can change and be manipulated.