Into the Water by Paula Hawkins

★★☆☆☆

Review:

Having just finished Paula Hawkins' The Girl on the Train, I was expecting to really enjoy this novel. Unfortunately, I never really got into it. There are so many narrators. SO. MANY. And then, in addition to narrators, there is also the intermittent narration of a book that the character Nel was writing prior to her death, bringing even more characters into this complicated cast!

It was difficult to figure out just exactly what was going on, and why the reader should even care about what is going on. Several girls and women have died in the river. We are told that aside from the first, who was drowned as a witch, the rest have been suicides. For the first two-thirds of the book, I was bored. Were all these peeks into the numerous narrators' lives going to point to a murder or just confirm the suicides? It was not until I passed the two-thirds mark that the book finally became entertaining. Had I not read this as an audiobook, this would have taken me ages to read.

Nel's daughter is a frustrating creature, but she is easily the most likeable. She will withhold information out of a sense of misguided duty, even if it will help investigators. It's both frustrating and admirable. Paula Hawkins did a fantastic job writing this character in particular.

Everyone is flawed. Everyone is suspect. Everyone knows more than they are letting on. Will you have the patience to find out the reasons behind each death in the Drowning Pool?

Audience: adult
Recommended for fans of: mystery
Trigger warnings: suicide, murder

Publisher's Synopsis:

A single mother turns up dead at the bottom of the river that runs through town. Earlier in the summer, a vulnerable teenage girl met the same fate. They are not the first women lost to these dark waters, but their deaths disturb the river and its history, dredging up secrets long submerged.

Left behind is a lonely fifteen-year-old girl. Parentless and friendless, she now finds herself in the care of her mother's sister, a fearful stranger who has been dragged back to the place she deliberately ran from—a place to which she vowed she'd never return.

With the same propulsive writing and acute understanding of human instincts that captivated millions of readers around the world in her explosive debut thriller, The Girl on the Train, Paula Hawkins delivers an urgent, twisting, deeply satisfying read that hinges on the deceptiveness of emotion and memory, as well as the devastating ways that the past can reach a long arm into the present.

Beware a calm surface—you never know what lies beneath.

Source:

Libby

©Penguin Audio: May 2, 2017
Edition: Audiobook

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