Girl on the Train (Hawkins) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
The Girl on the Train has more fun with unreliable narration than any chiller since Gone Girl…. Paula Hawkins [is] no slouch when it comes to trickery or malice…. Ms. Hawkins scrambles the timing of scenes, with Megan gone in one chapter and then present in the next. She also shifts well among her narrators' points of view to keep the reader on edge, and only as the book progresses do these different perspectives begin to dovetail. Scrambling a story is easy, but it's done here to tight, suspenseful effect.
Janet Maslin - New York Times


Paula Hawkins has come up with an ingenious slant on the currently fashionable amnesia thriller.... Hawkins juggles perspectives and timescales with great skill, and considerable suspense builds up along with empathy for an unusual central character.
Guardian (UK)


Like its train, the story blasts through the stagnation of these lives in suburban London and the reader cannot help but turn pages.... The welcome echoes of Rear Window throughout the story and its propulsive narrative make The Girl on the Train an absorbing read.
Boston Globe


Given the number of titles that are declared to be "the next" of a bestseller...book fans have every right to be wary. But Paula Hawkins’ novel The Girl on the Train just might have earned the title of "the next Gone Girl."
Christian Science Monitor


[A] twisty thriller.... It’s being called the next Gone Girl.
USA Today


[The Girl on the Train] pulls off a thriller's toughest trick: carefully assembling everything we think we know, until it reveals the one thing we didn't see coming.
Entertainment Weekly


Gone Girl fans will devour this psychological thriller.... Hawkins’s debut ends with a twist that no one—least of all its victims—could have seen coming.
People


Hawkins’s taut story roars along at the pace of, well, a high-speed train.... Hawkins delivers a smart, searing thriller that offers readers a 360-degree view of lust, love, marriage and divorce.
Good Housekeeping


There’s nothing like a possible murder to take the humdrum out of your daily commute.
Cosmopolitan


Rachel takes the same train into London every day, daydreaming about the lives of the occupants in the homes she passes. But when she sees something unsettling from her window one morning, it sets in motion a chilling series of events that make her question whom she can really trust.
Woman’s Day


(Starred review.) [A] psychologically astute debut.... [Hawkins] deftly shifts between the accounts of the addled Rachel, as she desperately tries to remember what happened, Megan, and, eventually, Anna, for maximum suspense. The surprise-packed narratives hurtle toward a stunning climax, horrifying as a train wreck and just as riveting.
Publishers Weekly


[U]nfortunately, by using [different narrators for each chapter], debut author Hawkins confuses the reader. With only a brief look into backstory, undeveloped characters offer no reason or motivation for their actions, and none of them is likable. [A] disappointing psychological thriller. —Marianne Fitzgerald, Severna Park H.S., MD
Library Journal


(Starred review.) Desperate to find lives more fulfilling than her own, a lonely London commuter imagines the story of a couple she's only glimpsed through the train window in Hawkins' chilling, assured debut.... Even the most astute readers will be in for a shock as Hawkins slowly unspools the facts, exposing the harsh realities of love and obsession's inescapable links to violence.
Kirkus Reviews