The Girl on the Train - Paula Hawkins

Click here for my premiere audiovisual review if you are too lazy to read, bless your heart.

I have held back on writing a review of this one for weeks and weeks, both because I was beginning to get holiday busy at work and because I couldn't figure out how to review it and not spoil the stew out of it in any way, shape, or form. I hate it when that happens. I will never do that to you, I promise.


There is a creeper Girl on the Train who makes it a habit to follow the lives of people she sees from her vantage point on her daily commute, all of whom are just minding their own business in their own homes which are unfortunately situated within viewing distance from the train tracks. Over time, she has become all wrapped up in the stories she has created for them in her increasingly muddled psyche.


She reminded me very much of myself. Well, absent the train, and a bit shy of her level of creepy.  I don't really spy on people, but I love people-watching and I do frequently pass time by writing short stories in my head about why the people I see are where they are when I see them, especially if they are doing something untoward, like the man I saw hanging out of his car at Publix a couple weeks ago. He was obviously very unwell, and his companion/wife/whatever had left him in the car with the door open. I was in the store for about a half hour, and when I returned to my car he was still there and now I was pretty sure he wasn't breathing anymore and his companion/wife/whatever wasn't yet back to the car so I'm certain she must have put arsenic in his food and was slowly, slowly, slowly making her way through the aisles of the grocery to give it time to do its thing so she could feign horror and deep grief and take to carryin' on in public when she got back to the parking lot and discovered him there, lifeless. Ambulances and law enforcement would be called, and the whole thing would cast Publix as an undeserving backdrop for a tawdry, ill-fated romance's deadly conclusion.

Or maybe he was just really sick and she was hung up at the pharmacy window filling a prescription, and they wound up getting home just fine and he felt all better, and the rest of the evening was spent watching reruns of some sub-tier TV series that everybody else watched 6 years ago but which they've just now figured out how to stream.

But I digress.

The Girl on the Train won't be in the running for a Pulitzer Prize or anything, but great googly-moogly, it was as malevolently addictive as Gone Girl.


Publication Date:  January 13, 2015