The Girl on the Train, by Paula Hawkins

The Girl on the Train

It's not often that I listen to an audiobook when I'm not driving, but this book snagged me so hard I've actually just finished it after a marathon 3 hour listening streak in my home (I had to finish it, I could tell I was near the end and didn't want to wait anymore). I listened to the last bit on 1.5X speed to finish it even faster.

It's a mystery told from the viewpoint of 3 women.

1. Rachel, the main character, is a drunk who rides a train into London every day and watches the occupants of a house on the street where she used to live before her husband divorced her and  married his mistress. She frequently gets black out drunk and calls/texts/emails him. At times you feel sorry for her but at other times you get angry with her. If she was more truthful and wasn't still hung up on her ex it would have been a shorter book.

2. Megan is one of the occupants of the house Rachel watches. Rachel doesn't hide in the bushes or anything, she actually only sees Megan and her husband (Scott) if they happen to be outside during the short time her train passes their backyard. Or, since this is England, their "garden". The person narrating Megan on the audiobook is my favorite of the 3. I like her accent the most. Rachel has constructed a fantasy life for Megan and Scott, so that when she sees Megan kiss another man she reacts like a crazy person and actually decides to go to their house and tell the husband about the affair. She does this by getting blackout drunk first so that the next day she has no idea what happened. It's during this blackout that Megan goes missing. Rachel then spends the rest of the book putting herself in the middle of the investigation and creating a relationship with Scott (built on the lie that she was Megan's acquaintance). Rachel goes back and forth, jumping to many conclusions as to the culprit of the disappearance. "Scott couldn't have done it, he loved Megan, I know this because I've seen them drink tea on their terrace, like, a hundred time, and in my mind I know them so I'm totally right. It was the boyfriend. Okay the police say it wasn't the boyfriend and he wasn't even her boyfriend. Scott just scared me because he found out about my lies so IT MUST BE SCOTT!" It's a long book, she waffles a lot. She also struggles with her drinking and tries super hard to figure out what happened the night Megan went missing. Honestly, I totally thought it was possible that she had something to do with it a few times. I think this was the author's point. Rachel talks about other things she would do during blackouts, that her then-husband would tell her about the next morning. She apparently got mean and nasty, and violent a very few times. It's way toward the end that she realizes he wasn't truthful with her and on one occasion (when she tried to kill him with a golf club) it was actually HE who was the violent one. He would attack her when she was drunk and then tell her she started it the next day.

4. Anna is Rachel's ex husband's new wife. She was his mistress. She didn't get her own narration until well into the book. She's not a sympathetic character, because you've already been introduced to Rachel, and even with Rachel's faults you're mainly on her side, so you see Anna as the villain. Anna doesn't help it when in one passage she talks about how exciting it was being the other woman, and how she felt no guilt.

It's a while before we can piece together what happened, but I'm going to spoil the shit out of this:

In Megan's narration she talks about the man she's cheating on her husband with. Infuriatingly she gives little detail. Rachel keeps having conflicting memories of the night she went missing. Did I mention the next day when Rachel wakes up, hungover, she's got cuts on her face and head? That's why I thought she had something to do with the disappearance. She was angry that her fantasy couple was not like her fantasy and as someone who was cheated on she couldn't stand that Megan was doing that to her husband. So the night Megan disappeared, Megan and Scott had an argument and Megan went to the train station. Rachel was coming from the train station. I thought maybe they'd met up and Rachel had confronted her and in a drunken rage either killed her, or scared her enough to make her run away. Megan talked about being a runaway in the past.

Anyway, Rachel remembers someone, probably a man, hurting her, and seeing a woman (who first she thinks is Anna) walking away from her and getting into a car. It turns out that her ex was cheating on his new wife with Megan (shocker) and even though he'd broken it off with her, that night Megan had wanted to see him. So he's on edge because Megan is adamant to see him, and then when his wife is supposed to leave she sees a drunk Rachel on the street, so it's like all this shit is falling on him at once. He goes out to see Rachel, quickly roughs her up a bit, and then sees Megan walking along and picks her up in his car. She has recently discovered she's pregnant and just wants to let him know. She has decided that she's going to stop the lies and get everything out in the open. The ex (Tom) is a bastard about it, because it turns out he's been an asshole all along, it's just Rachel was too in love to see it, and they get into an argument where he insults Megan's ability to be a mom and tells her to get rid of it, and she says she's telling everyone everything and she's going to ruin his life. So he kills her and buries her in a shallow grave.

Rachel remembers seeing Megan and Tom together pretty much the same day that Anna discovers a hidden cell phone in her Tom's things (that turns out to be Megan's). Rachel goes to Anna and Tom's house and tries to get Anna to leave with her, because she's certain that Tom killed Megan. Tom comes home, confesses after he realizes they ain't buying his bullshit, and then tries to kill Rachel. Rachel ends up stabbing him with a corkscrew. Anna calls the police and they tell the police it was in self defense, and that they tried to save him and all that, but really Anna had choked him to make sure he was dead. You learn that he was basically a sociopath throughout the whole story. He deserved it.

The book ends with Rachel riding a train out to visit Megan's grave, and thinking about where else she'll end up. Apparently she's sober, and doing a bit of travelling until she get's her life together.

This is Paula Hawkin's only book. I'm disappointed in that. I really liked it, even though it dragged on a little at times. I opened up the audible store, totally intending to buy another of her books immediately. I'm going to have to remember her name, to look her up occasionally.

Let's talk about Lost in a Good Book!

(Note: I wrote this a long long long time ago and just noticed that my blogger dashboard thingy says it's unpublished. So boom. Published.)

WHEN WILL I LEARN??? I finished this days ago and already lent the book out AND NOW I REMEMBER NOTHING.

Ummm.

Here is a better synopsis than I care to write: Tada!

Something that bothers me: in the first book, they act as if jumping into books is this novel thing that no one knows about. When she goes into Jane Eyre, no one there mentions Jurisfiction, the Great Library, or the Character Exchange Program. When she's in that world it's just like ours, basically. Fforde treats it like going back in time, sort of. But now in this book characters jump from book to book, they communicate through footnotes, they make small alterations to stories as needed, and it's like between books Fforde had this idea of a world behind the pages and decided to write it out even though it doesn't really make sense when compared to the first one. It's a wonderful premise, but it doesn't fit!

That's my only problem.

Mark Tufo

I just finished book 5 of the Zombie Fallout series by Mark Tufo. The series started out kind of funny, kind of interesting. The main character, Michael Talbot, is pretty crazy, has pretty bad luck, and somehow surrounds himself with zany, wacky characters. Also, Tufo has little problem putting his main characters in danger, which is refreshing. So often as a series goes on it can get pretty routine, because you know the main guys aren't going anywhere. So Tufo is a welcome change. Or was.

Book 5 (Alive in a Dead World) was a bit of a bore. Also, I've started to notice some repetitiveness that could be forgiven in, say, a Stephen King book, but in this mediocre writing is a big distraction and annoyance.

Michael and his brothers all call each other "brother". In this book it's mainly Michael and one brother, but he's done this when speaking to all his brothers, one on one, in the past books and I bet it gets pretty confusing when all 4 of them are in the same room. Also, none of them are Hulk Hogan so they should just stop. If it was just the Talbots, maybe I could forgive it, but the two main bad guys of the book, Tomas and Eliza, also call each other brother and sister. Nope, Tufo, I'm not buying it.

In previous books sometimes Michael (or less frequently other characters) would include a story from the past into their narration. In book 5 Tufo takes this to a whole 'nother level of distraction by having one guy be reminded of an incident in college WHILE FIGHTING A ZOMBIE. In this middle of this fight, we as the reader are treated to the entire college thing in excruciating detail. Honestly, it had absolutely no bearing on the fight. It was a distraction that had zero point. It's like Tufo just wanted to shoehorn that in somewhere and picked a spot at random.

"Oh, the zombie is chasing me! I better hold this door closed. Oh, that reminds me of the time in college we did blah blah blah........."


........30 minutes of narration later "and that's how that happened. Anyway, oh yeah, gotta hold this zombie out"

We were also treated, elsewhere in the book, to the time Michael and two friends went to a concert one weekend and got really really super drunk and also high on the weed and the mushrooms. This one had the added bonus of Michael, a father of 3, driving whilst very drunk and endangering the lives of his friends and EVERYONE ELSE.

This was the second story of the book that included these same friends going to a concert and drinking a lot. The first story ended with a car crash and all 3 on the hospital. As teenagers. This taught them nothing, obviously.

This book would have been probably 2 hours shorter if people stopped getting distracted by their own memories. I think Tufo was just trying to cram in extra shit so it would seem like an actual book and not just self-published crap.

Another way he has of filling up pages is to have his characters ask leading questions so other characters can explain the plot in great detail to each other even though we as the readers are way ahead of them. Oh and also he has them ask shit just so he can throw in useless info, like what "run flat" tires are. Like it's not totally evident in the name. Like you would even ask this question as you were rushing your dying husband to a doctor. (This was in an earlier book. Mike had just literally died and then miraculously came back to life, and he's being transported to a military base with his wife in a humvee, and she hears one of the guys say "run flat" and asks what that is and then we have to listen to the answer along with her, and it's like no, Tufo, she doesn't need to ask. She knows what it is. We all know what it is. Let's focus on the fact her husband was shot and his heart stopped beating and now it is again. No need to try to hold our attention with tire talk)

And lastly!!! Tufo hates cats. The scene with the cats was disturbing. You don't even have to be a cat lover to be bothered! Just care a little about animals at all and I swear this part will disappoint you. In case you're wondering, Mike's friend Paul is a complete doofus who just barely escapes zombies, and ends up with a broken leg and a sprained ankle, and gunshot in his foot THAT HE PUT THERE HIMSELF, in a house where several dozens of cats have been trapped since the apocalypse has started. They do what cats do. It's not pretty, but it's understandable. Mike finds his friend's body, and the cats, and reacts very violently. Look, I have 2 cats. I know that if I die on Monday they'll have started eating me by Wednesday. But they're animals and they can't open doors or order pizza, so I accept that fact. I wouldn't hate them for it.

Now a little bit about the author himself, Mark Tufo. He was born in Boston. Oh, so was Michael Talbot. He was a marine. So was Micheal Talbot!! He has 3 children and two English bulldogs. SO DOES MICHAEL TALBOT HOLY SHIT TALBOT IS TOTALLY TUFO'S MARY SUE.

I only just found that out when I linked to his Amazon author page. I don't know why a Mary Sue character is such a pet peeve of mine, but it is, and now that I've seen more evidence to support what I've kind of suspected, I'm not even sure I can give Tufo even one more chance.

Well, actually, I will because I still have one more book I've already paid for, so I'll finish it out of spite.