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3.45 AVERAGE
3.45 AVERAGE
I wanted to give this book 4 stars, but I started it yesterday. I never binge-read like this. So 5 stars it is...
nice followup. hawkins is good at atmosphere--i could see these characters and this town. it did take a bit of time to keep everyone straight...everyone was named so generically and i might have skipped a few of the POVs (mark didnt need any chapters, probably could have left out nickie or the boy and told their stuff through others) or named a few people wacky. jules was so weak as a person that her fierce determination not to talk to her sister for decades was out of character and stupid and sad. but outside of jules, i thought the cast was interesting and i really didn't know what was going on. i liked that it turned out to be two mysteries..and two things that mattered. i feel like many times if there's two loosely connected stories like this one of them ends up being a red herring for no purpose but that, but these worked well together. even if this had sucked i would still be following hawkins because i loved girl on a train, but she's keeping it going.
As I write these reviews I can’t remember a single thing about this book…lol
Oh..I wanted to give this book more stars because I really wanted to like it. I did not. Way too many characters (all of whom I did not like) and a downright confusing plot. This was the second attempt at trying to read this...I tried once before and gave up two chapters in...this time I stuck it out and finished...I don't know why...it was a big waste of my time.
It feels generous to give this book three stars, earned mostly in the final 100 pages, where the author finally gets around to connecting all the random plot floaters she'd been strewing about for the first 300 pages.
There are a lot of characters in this book, and they all get separate (short) chapters. The problem is, there are so many characters and so many divergent perspectives that it's hard to track just who got killed and who their killers might be--across several centuries, no less. You're constantly thinking--who is this, again? Oh yeah--the old guy's son's wife. And how does she figure into this story? There aren't many people to root for, either. And the setting is this place where women keep getting killed and jumping off cliffs. The first two-thirds of the book are a tough slog.
There's also this irritating, fey, half-baked tone to the storytelling, which feels kind of aimless until the end of the book, where there is a more focused plot rolling forward. Then, the ending is pretty good, and mostly redeems the book.
I was not a fan of "Girl on the Train," either, although lots of people thought it was great. I liked "Girl" more than "Water"--but I am probably done reading Hawkins.
There are a lot of characters in this book, and they all get separate (short) chapters. The problem is, there are so many characters and so many divergent perspectives that it's hard to track just who got killed and who their killers might be--across several centuries, no less. You're constantly thinking--who is this, again? Oh yeah--the old guy's son's wife. And how does she figure into this story? There aren't many people to root for, either. And the setting is this place where women keep getting killed and jumping off cliffs. The first two-thirds of the book are a tough slog.
There's also this irritating, fey, half-baked tone to the storytelling, which feels kind of aimless until the end of the book, where there is a more focused plot rolling forward. Then, the ending is pretty good, and mostly redeems the book.
I was not a fan of "Girl on the Train," either, although lots of people thought it was great. I liked "Girl" more than "Water"--but I am probably done reading Hawkins.
medium-paced
This was an okay story. There are A LOT of characters. Many served a purpose, but there were others that really didn't need their own chapters and could have just existed through their interactions with the other characters. And for the length of the novel, it seemed to wrap up pretty quickly and felt kind of....unfulfilling. Of her two books that I've read, this didn't entertain me as much as Girl on the Train did.
I didn’t enjoy this book. It was well written but the story itself I found boring and there was no thrill or psychological twists to this psychological thriller. I’d comment on the climax but I’m not sure there really ever was one. It was disappointingly basic, had too many perspectives, and I wouldn’t recommend it.
Paula Hawkins has not simply rewritten The Girl on the Train when she put together Into the Water, but she's written something that's marginally propulsive without offering any surprises.
Into the Water is told in the first person perspective of several different characters who are initially difficult to track, the third person perspective of a couple of other shadowy figures, and excerpts from the unpublished manuscript of a dead woman. Some of it gets lost in the mix, and it takes some time for the threads to even begin to sort themselves out; one could be forgiven for making it a third of the way through the book without knowing strictly who all of these people are or what the book is even about.
Into the Water becomes clear eventually, and Hawkins doesn't drain the novel of all dramatic tension as she essentially did too far away from the ending of her previous smash. It's not great, and the final chapter seems somewhat gratuitous, but it's relatively satisfactory for ultra commercial crime-ish fiction with no exploitative elements and aspirations towards literature. If Hawkins had focused on fewer voices, and if she had trusted the audience to build up the mystery more instead of feeding it to them, this could have been a much tighter novel, though it's not long at all.
The single strongest facet of Into the Water is the character of the interloping policewoman, Detective Sergeant Erin Morgan. This is the sort of character one can spin a series out of, and it's conceivable that Hawkins could do that going forward; that sort of common element can very easily solve the problem of worrying about dishing out more of the same.
Into the Water is told in the first person perspective of several different characters who are initially difficult to track, the third person perspective of a couple of other shadowy figures, and excerpts from the unpublished manuscript of a dead woman. Some of it gets lost in the mix, and it takes some time for the threads to even begin to sort themselves out; one could be forgiven for making it a third of the way through the book without knowing strictly who all of these people are or what the book is even about.
Into the Water becomes clear eventually, and Hawkins doesn't drain the novel of all dramatic tension as she essentially did too far away from the ending of her previous smash. It's not great, and the final chapter seems somewhat gratuitous, but it's relatively satisfactory for ultra commercial crime-ish fiction with no exploitative elements and aspirations towards literature. If Hawkins had focused on fewer voices, and if she had trusted the audience to build up the mystery more instead of feeding it to them, this could have been a much tighter novel, though it's not long at all.
The single strongest facet of Into the Water is the character of the interloping policewoman, Detective Sergeant Erin Morgan. This is the sort of character one can spin a series out of, and it's conceivable that Hawkins could do that going forward; that sort of common element can very easily solve the problem of worrying about dishing out more of the same.
Excellent book. Keeps you guessing right up to the chilling final sentence.