The Girl on the Train

Author: Paula Hawkins

One-sentence summary: An emotionally unstable woman inserts herself into the lives of people she sees from the train into London each day.

B.A.D. Girls Book Rating: 7

Our favorite thing about it: The story moved along nicely and kept us interested.

Our least favorite thing about it: We found the whole premise a little creepy and not that original.

Main Topics of Discussion: Divorce, Job-hunting, alcoholism/addiction, therapy, relationships, roommates

Our favorite quote: “I have never understood how people can blithely disregard the damage they do by following their hearts.”

Notes: Our initial reaction to this story was that the main character, Rachel, was really creepy. She was abnormally fascinated with people she had watched, made up names for, and had never met. She had an abnormal attachment to them and to top it off, they lived down the street from where she used to live with her ex-husband, who now lives there with his new wife and baby daughter. Creepy, right? And poor Rachel was burdened by an alcoholic addiction that she never seemed able to get control of or to ask for help with. We simultaneously really felt for her and understood her feelings and yet could not completely comprehend all of her thoughts and actions.

Some of us felt that the ending was rushed a bit and that an encounter with one of the characters (Scott) was a little weird and out of character for him. It seemed to create a violent event that was out of left field and didn’t even relate to the eventual outcome of the story. It wasn’t even a big plot twist.

We actually compared this novel a little bit to Gone Girl, which may be unfair. We didn’t like the ending (or non-ending, as the case may be) of Gone Girl at all. We thought the books were similar because of the thriller-type story that has a psychological vein running through it as well as a disturbed main character. But Gone Girl kept us on our toes and maneuvered through some very shocking plot twists a lot better than this novel. Again, it may be unfair to compare, but those were just our thoughts. In other words, we felt that this basic story had been told before and in a much better way.

One thing that was interesting and made the outcome harder to figure out was the unreliability of our main character and narrator, Rachel. She never could figure out the true motives and personality of anyone. Scott, her ex-husband, the new wife, the therapist…we saw them all through her eyes and therefore, we didn’t have a clue what or who any of them were either. At its best, it is a clever narrative technique and at its worst, it was incredibly annoying to not ever get any reliable information!

Overall, we enjoyed this story and ended up giving it a fairly high rating because of how easy and fun it was to read.

Memorable Meeting Moments: This was Stephanie’s meeting and we had another non-traditional gathering. We met at Chiloso for dinner and dessert and then went to the movie together to see Pitch Perfect 2.

What We Ate: Yummy Tex-Mex at Chiloso and Stephanie’s sopapilla cheesecake!