*WARNING: THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS*
(I tried to write a spoiler-free review, I really did. But I can’t talk about all the stuff I want to cover without giving away the ending, so if you clicked this review thinking that “well, maybe the spoilers won’t be too extensive,” be warned that I am going to spoil basically everything about the ending. So unless you’ve already read the book or have no intention of ever reading it, continue at your own risk)
Julia “Jules” Abbott is called back to her childhood town of Beckford, England, after receiving disturbing news: her older sister Nell is dead, from an apparent suicide, and Julia is now the legal guardian of Nell’s teenage daughter, Lena. But there are questions surrounding Nell’s death, beginning with the place where she apparently killed herself. Nell died in a place known as the Drowning Pool, a section of the river where, historically, women have drowned themselves or been drowned – including Lena’s best friend, who killed herself a few months before Nell’s death. Nell was in the process of writing a book about the Drowning Pool, and the stories of the women who died there, and as Julia and the police investigate Nell’s death, they begin to suspect that all of these deaths are connected, and that Nell had uncovered secrets dangerous enough to make Julia question if her death was really a suicide at all.
My first mistake was listening to this as an audiobook, instead of getting a physical copy from the library. There are a lot of characters who narrate different chapters (to the point where I was two-thirds into the novel and still had trouble keeping everyone straight) and also the timeline skips around – we have the current-day chapters, the flashbacks to Julia’s childhood, and the sections from Nel’s book on the Drowning Pool. Listening to the novel, instead of reading it, meant that I couldn’t flip back to remind myself what time period we were in, or remember how a certain narrator fit into the main plot.
And Paula Hawkins apparently decided that she needed to complicate things even more, because not only do characters get chapters written from their personal perspectives, but some chapters are in first person, and some are in third person. Julia’s chapters are written as if she’s addressing Nell directly, always calling her “you.” I kind of get why Hawkins does this – Julia, we realize pretty quickly, has some serious Issues to work out, and other characters often notice her talking to herself, so I can see why Hawkins would want to make it seem like all of Julia’s chapters are conversations that she’s having with her dead sister. But it was still jarring and obnoxious. Also some of Julia’s chapters are titled “Julia” while other are titled “Jules” and if anyone can explain the logic for this choice, please explain it to me because it was confounding.
Speaking of confounding, many of the characters are infuriatingly inconsistent, especially Julia and her niece, Lena. In addition to her confusingly-written chapters, Julia also does that thing that only characters in badly-written thrillers do, where she gets a desperate voicemail from her sister telling her to call her back because she has something really important to tell her (why not just tell her on the voicemail, you might be asking? shhhhhh), and Julia just rolls her eyes and is like, ugh my sister is so dramatic, and never calls her back. And then next thing you know, Nell is dead and Julia can’t figure out why the cops are so annoyed with her. Julia is especially frustrating because she acts like she’s in one novel, and all the other characters are in another. At the end, when Lena is missing and Julia is trying to find her, she goes to see Lena’s father (who, in a disappointing lack of twist, turns out to just be Nell’s ex-boyfriend. My money was on Mr. Henderson, for the record). This is a good instinct, but once Julia establishes that Lena’s not there, she gets sidetracked and decides that now, in the middle of her search for her missing teenage ward, is a good time to resolve her own trauma and confront her childhood rapist. And then she goes home and walks into the river and has to be rescued by emergency services, and by the way, Lena is still missing.
And then when Lena gets home safely, Julia looks at this teenage girl, who has gone through a) the suicide of her best friend b) the death/possible murder of her mother and c) a kidnapping by a child molester and possible murderer, all in a matter of months, and Julia decides that this is a great time to sit Lena down and say, hey, want to hear the story of how your mom’s boyfriend raped me when I was twelve, and I lived my entire life hating your mom because I thought she knew about it? Julia. Jesus. Read the room. She even admits that this is just for her benefit, and that “I couldn’t tell you [Nell], so I told her.” No one else’s trauma matters except Julia’s.
Lena is significantly less frustrating, but she basically functions as a misdirection machine: first she insists that her mother jumped, and then later is convinced that she was murdered. She protects the identity of the adult man who had sex with her friend, even though she hated him and wanted to see him punished, because she had promised her friend to keep the secret. Fine, whatever, just as long as it keeps the plot going for a few more chapters, right Hawkins?
And then there are the multiple plot points that get introduced and then dropped without resolution, like the diet pills and Katie’s mother’s weird alibi and the missing camera card and that weird incest-y vibe between Helen and Patrick, and they read less like red herrings and more like plots that Hawkins got bored with and abandoned. And, most frustrating of all, the fact that we never find out, definitively, what happened to Mr. Henderson was a weird choice, to say the least. We have chapters where we’re in Lena’s head – there’s no reason for her to keep that information from the readers unless Hawkins was planning some kind of payoff at the end, which she obviously wasn’t. Maybe Hawkins figured that the readers were smart enough to put the pieces together themselves, but that doesn’t exactly work. This novel, and also The Girl on the Train, spend a significant amount of time teaching the reader that nothing should be taken for granted, whether it be the accuracy of a character’s memories or the meaning behind a conversation. So for Hawkins to just leave that thread dangling and let us make assumptions about what happened without confirming it seemed sloppy and lazy, and not what I expected from her.
Man, that turned into way more of a rant than I intended. But apparently I was way more frustrated with this book than I realized. Anyway, long story short: frustrating, with inconsistent characterization and sloppy plotting. Give it a pass – there are better, juicier thrillers out there.
(also, I figured out that Sean did it as soon as I read the scene with him getting angry at Erin in the car, so the last few chapters were robbed of any kind of tension, and the ending line was more like a relief than a twist, because finally Hawkins came out and said it)
loudbookishtype 