Girls, Girls, Girls

The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins seems like it's supposed to be in the same vein as Gone Girl and is in fact blurbed as such but is actually a less literary version of Gone Girl. It's kind of ridiculous to lump them together because Girl (Train and not Gone) is so just a potboiler. It's "good" in the sense that there's never really a moment in the writing where you're pulled out of it by something asinine. Still, it feels thin, like a synopsis of a film, which apparently it will be, the lead set to be played by Emily Blunt. And that last part undercuts the one interesting thing about the book: that the main character is (as she writes it) a physically repellent alcoholic who blacks out often (and you thought you had an unreliable narrator . . .). Unless (spoiler here) the gaslighting theme is in full effect, and unless she doesn't Bridget Jones herself in the way Renée Zellweger did, it's hard to see how Emily Blunt can uglify this character.

Posted: September 4th, 2015 | Author: | Filed under: Books Are The SUVs Of Writing | Tags: ,