I greatly enjoyed Paula Hawkins’ debut novel, “Girl on the Train.” I read it as an audiobook and found it compelling and interesting from beginning to end. A twisty thriller with unreliable narrators and shifting truths that kept you on your toes. I was thus excited to embark on her second novel, “Into the Water” but did not have the same experience and won’t be recommending this one to others. A sleepy English town is rocked by the “suicide” by water of one of its […]
Review roundup! Female-centric thillers
I badly need to catch up with writing reviews, but don’t really have the inclination to write long and individual reviews for books that were mostly ‘meh’. I sometimes pick up thrillers when I need a break from fantasy, and this review covers several that I’ve read since the early summer, in order that I read them. In some cases I have to cast my mind back rather a long way–and some definitely made an impression more than others. Most of these I read pretty […]
“Beckford is not a suicide spot. Beckford is a place to get rid of troublesome women.”
I have a well documented problem with books that have too many characters, particularly when the too many characters each have chapters from their point of views, so I don’t think I was every going to love Into the Water… That being said, even if the novel only focused on two or three of the characters I still don’t think I would have been into it, definitely not like I was with Hawkins’ previous novel Girl on the Train or any of the other recent strings of female focused […]
Turds also go into the water
This book is pretty bad, ya’ll. Like not very good at all. It suffers from a lot of issues. One, the world created within it is so poorly rendered it seems but overwhelming and fake. So there’s pretty much nothing in this book that has anything connecting it to the wider world. It’s all PLOT PLOT PLOT PLOT and nothing else, which CAN be fine but just doesn’t work here because she TRYING so hard to make this richer and real. There’s a historical context […]