|
What a disappointment! Paula Hawkins's Girl on the Train was so good and twisty that I had great expectations for Into the Water, but it is a major letdown.
The narrative is extremely choppy; chapters alternate among a large variety of point-of-view characters (sometimes first person, sometimes third person), not to mention there are a handful of extracts from a book one of the characters is supposed to have written, which adds even more people and relationships to the mix. The audiobook featured a cast of five narrators (even with so many, they still had to voice multiple POV characters), which certainly helped, but even so, when various characters were mentioned I kept having to stop and try to remember Who's that? How's he connected to the current POV character and the events? It was a lot of effort, for very little reward, as none of the characters was especially relatable.
The main character--I guess--was the estranged sister of a woman who jumped/fell/was pushed from a cliff into the water. But then the focus would shift to the woman's teenage daughter, and then to a policewoman, and then to the weird neighborhood psychic, and then to the grieving mother of a suicide, and then to a schoolteacher, and then to a policeman, and then to the policeman's father, and then to the brother of a suicide, and on and on. There were hints of witchcraft, ghosts, lingering evil. But they simply didn't go anywhere in this meandering, confusing story.
I stopped caring about suicide vs. homicide, separating lies from truth, who killed whom and why. Now that I've finished the book, I realize I'm still not sure about one character's fate, but I don't much care.
Bah.
|