If you are looking for a well written, fast moving psychological thriller in the vein of Gillian Flynn’s brilliant Gone Girl you will be entertained and satisfied with The Girl on the Train. Like Gone Girl, The Girl on the Train uses an unreliable narrator structure to keep the reader off balance, revealing information bits at a time so that your understanding of the story keeps changing. It also features characters that are largely unlikable, yet strangely compelling, and keeps you turning the pages even […]
Like Gone Girl’s Twin, but Slightly Better
Rachel rides the train every day. And every day she passes the same homes and people going through their same routines. Until one day, something changes. What Rachel sees alters the trajectory of her life that is already complicated with a divorce and alcoholism. Anna is a stay at home mom. Although her life seems simple, she lives in the shadow of her husband’s ex-wife, struggling with raising her two-year old daughter and keeping her sanity while trying to maintain a happy marriage. Megan shouldn’t […]
Gillian Flynn: Lite edition
I’m going to be honest with y’all, I heard about The Girl on the Train through a recommendation on Reese Witherspoon’s instagram page. I figure if she is making Big Little Lies into an HBO miniseries and produced last year’s Gone Girl she must have pretty good literary taste. And she does! There are a lot of comparisons between The Girl on the Train and Gone Girl floating around and they aren’t incorrect. There are multiple narratives told by unreliable narrators with a missing woman […]
Artificial Confessional
…The problem is the presentation. Each chapter begins with a specific date and a vague time of day, “evening” or “morning.” It takes on the feel of a journal, like the reader gets to peek inside each woman’s story. I say story because each of these women is an unreliable narrator. More than that, even, there is the sense that they have thought out what they are going to say and how they will present it to the reader. When it is assumed these are […]