Audiobook Review: The Girl on the Train

The Girl on the Train (2015)
Written by Paula Hawkins
Narrated by Clare Corbett, Louise Brealey and India Fisher
Run Time: 10 hours 59 minutes
Publisher: Penguin Audio/Riverhead

Occasionally, I take the commuter train to downtown Los Angeles' iconic Union Station for certain work items. Along the way, I often gaze out the window, only to see the back of industrial buildings and districts. It was with this frame of reference that I gravitated toward the first big bestseller of 2015, Paula Hawkins' highly anticipated debut The Girl on the Train.

Take a mystery, add Hitchcock voyeurism, British flair and a dash of Gone Girl to make a gripping thriller. Rachel the title character, has been battling alcoholism and coming to terms with a divorce. During her commute, she sees her idea of a perfect couple on a house balcony and imagines their lives. On an average day, she sees the wife is not there and an investigation ensues. Anna is the wife of Rachel's ex-husband and despises Rachel for her various afflictions. The third narrator is Megan, the wife that has gone missing.

The book is unmistakably British and it's all the better for it. I read some early reviews that complained about the use of British slang like "petrol" and "bonnet," but for me, it made me like the novel even more. I like books that give a real sense of time and place and this novel does that in spades.

The Girl on the Train's voyeuristic tones trace directly to Alfred Hitchcock. Most people think of his style in the form of the infamous shower scene in Psycho, but a better example is that film's opening sequence. After the opening credits and the famous Bernard Hermann score, the camera pans across the Phoenix cityscape and glides through the window of an open office building to where the action begins to unfold. I kept thinking back to that whenever Rachel described what she was seeing outside the train.

Understandably, the book has been compared to Gone Girl, which it does have some similarities. Both feature marriage troubles and a desperate housewife, but the likeliness pretty much ends there.

Overall, I liked The Girl on the Train despite it having characters I didn't root for. It's hard watching characters make the wrong choices over and over again, but I was genuinely surprised at the ending. One of the narrators desperately tries to right the ship and solves the case in a way that I didn't see coming and when I looked back on it, the plot made perfect sense. It wasn't just a plot twist for the sake of having a twist. Hawkins constructed a realistic, detailed world and trusts her audience, while managing to stay one step ahead.

Grade: 4/5 stars. It's a dark thriller, but it wasn't as bleak or jaded as some other books in the genre like Gone Girl, which made it more palpable for me. The audio narration was superb, with each character clearly defined and the book breezed right by like a commuter train. If you like the genre, pick this one up and enjoy the ride.

As one may expect, a film version is in the works. Per the latest news, a script is due to be turned in soon.

Penguin Train Brings Finest News

• There was a major shakeup at Penguin's adult imprints Tuesday, which feature some of my favorites like Viking and Riverhead. Nearly every Penguin imprint was affected, from the aforementioned divisions to Dutton and Putnam, all of which make regular appearances on the bestseller lists. Even smaller ones like Avery, which focuses on health-related books, were impacted. There were three key headliner changes, but arguably the one most visible to the average reader is the late-summer closure of Gotham Books and Hudson Street Press.

Any change at the behemoth known as Penguin Random House impacts bookstores by virtue of that company being the biggest publisher by far with dozens of divisions, or imprints. The problem with having this many imprints is that eventually, there will be overlap and that's what led to the closure of Gotham and Hudson Street. For example, I've always found Viking to have a wide variety of titles. It manages to publish nonfiction history like The Boys in the Boat to fiction like Mo Yan's controversial Frog and throws in some critical thinking books from the likes of Sir Ken Robinson along the way. With that wide of range, there's bound to be some overlap with other Penguin imprints.

• On Friday, I wrote about three trends for 2015 films based on books. Naturally, dates and movies were shuffled after that post's publication. Instead of The Jungle Book coming Oct. 9, Disney has opted to delay that to April 2016 and bump up its adaptation of the Michael J. Tougias book The Finest Hours, the true story of the Coast Guard's rescue of two oil tankers during a 1952 Nor'easter storm. The film stars Chris Pine (Star Trek, Into the Woods), Casey Affleck (Interstellar, Oceans trilogy) and Eric Bana (Lone Survivor, Hulk). So essentially, they swapped one trend of public domain stories for another in survival stories. Frankly, I don't think it's a bad trade. I had already planned to cover The Finest Hours when it was set for release. When the book was published by Scribner in 2009, it received generally favorable reviews and it currently has a 3.91 on Goodreads.

• In other book film news, the adaptation of Paula Hawkins' debut novel The Girl on the Train is gaining more traction at DreamWorks. Erin Cressida Wilson is set to turn in a script soon. The story is about a train commuter with an unreliable memory becoming entangled in a murder investigation. Hawkins' novel is taking the literary world by storm and has been flagged as a major bestseller of 2015. This one, along with Kristin Hannah's The Nightingale, which is set for publication next month, have been heavily hyped for months. Hawkins' novel was published this week by Riverhead. I'm about three hours into the audiobook and the novel is definitely dark and twisty while the comparisons to Hitchcock are accurate.

• Speaking of Hitchcock and trains, Gone Girl writer and screenwriter Gillian Flynn is re-teaming with star Ben Affleck and director David Fincher for a remake of the Alfred Hitchcock thriller Strangers on a Train. No word yet on a release date.