Suburbia is a favorite setting of authors and screenplay writers. I think of it as the perfect setting to explore what a person is truly made up of. When thrown from the carefree life of a working single man or woman into a responsible mortgage paying adult with a family to take care of, what does one really chose to become? It's easy for us to make bad or good choices when the life that we are part of makes progress day by day, there is a hope that things will get better - personally, professionally, even morally. But what choices do we make when life seems stagnate or seems like you've accomplished all that you thought of or even worser there is no hope of anything getting better at all? It could get boring at times. It could make a person without a busy life go totally bonkers, annoyed, and even depressed. American beauty - a superb example of life in the suburbia. How seemingly perfect families you see through windows are not so perfect.
In The girl on the train, Paula Hawkins explores this concept. You see characters that appear to be ordinary turn out to be the most interesting ones you've met in a while. The entire set of characters, 5 main ones in total, are well developed through the book and reveal surprising things about them up until the end. Sometimes their behavior doesn't even make sense. You see them compare and contrast their past life to the one they are currently in. And none of the 5 seem to like it. So in that manner the character study is twice as much compared to books with one or two focal characters. But this creates a depth vs. breadth struggle for the author. So eventually you see known patterns develop that make the book a little less interesting than contemporary mystery thrillers with fewer characters. But on the whole, Ms. Hawkins utilizes the plenitude of the characters to her advantage thereby having the reader take several guesses as to who the bad guy is.
The book does a great job of depicting a person's downfall, through Rachel for the most part. You cannot help but pity her and hate her both at the same time. It does the same with another character but I'll leave it to you to find out who. No one loves spoilers, right?
Called the next Gone Girl, rightly so for the similarities of setting (suburbia, missing woman, mind games) and the narrative style the book is a less thrilling and less mysterious version of Gone Girl. If you have read you fair share of mystery novels or watched enough romantic thrillers you will correctly guess what's happening about half way down the book. That kills the suspense a bit. Unlike Gone Girl this one doesn't have too many twists, so less of a page turner. Nevertheless a page turner.
I'll give this 4 out of 5 stars because of the character development. The reason it was a page turner for me was I kept wanting to see what this person does next or what they did in the past that was going to be disclosed on the next page. And with each fact that is exposed, each new situation explained you continue to make surprising discoveries about the characters. We all exhibit a little voyeurism, just like Rachel, and that makes the book interesting for the reader. Only in Rachel's case she took it to a whole another level.
