Thoughts on : Into the Water by Paula Hawkins

Posted by on September 19, 2018 2:01 am in 3.5 stars reads | 2 comments

Into the Water by Paula Hawkins
Genre : Mystery
Stand alone

About the Book  :

In the last days before her death, Nel called her sister. Jules didn’t pick up the phone, ignoring her plea for help.

Now Nel is dead. They say she jumped. And Jules has been dragged back to the one place she hoped she had escaped for good, to care for the teenage girl her sister left behind.

But Jules is afraid. So afraid. Of her long-buried memories, of the old Mill House, of knowing that Nel would never have jumped. And most of all she’s afraid of the water, and the place they call the Drowning Pool . . .

My Thoughts :

I think I bought my copy of Into the Water almost as soon as it came out, but it took my mom reading it for me to finally decide to give it a try. I knew it received a lot of mixed reviews at the time of its release, but I couldn’t remember why exactly. I just knew it hadn’t been a favorite for readers I follow and I was curious to see what I would think about it.

Overall, I’d say my experience was very similar to the one I had when reading The Girl on the Train. It’s a captivating thriller with flawed characters, it’s atmospheric, full of secrets, and the pace is good.

However, just like with The Girl on the Train, despite an interesting story, I also thought it was very predictable. Sometimes I feel as though authors add multiple points of view to make the story more confusing, but for me, it often has the opposite effect: I start wondering why a specific point of view has been added and what role they play in the story, while if they’d simply been added as a character in someone else’s narration, I might not have noticed them.

So, while I did enjoy the small town vibe and the somewhat eerie atmosphere (it’s a perfect mystery novel for the fall season), I felt let down by the story itself. I don’t mind a mystery that is slightly predictable; I’ve read so many of them that I usually can see where things are going. But sadly this book failed to surprise me. I felt like every character played exactly the role you would expect them to.

So, it’s not a bad book, and I had a good time reading it. It’s in fact better than some other thrillers that really disappointed me this year. I’d recommend it if you enjoyed The Girl on the Train, and like multiple points of view, small towns and atmospheric stories. My mom reads a lot of thrillers too (almost exclusively, in fact!), and absolutely liked this one, so it might be a favourite for you too. After all, it did win the 2017 Goodreads choice award!

2 Comments

  1. This is one of the rare books I gave up on. I listened to it and, after a few hours, realized I had no idea what was going so I quit.

    • Oh, I can easily imagine it. Even having read it on paper, I constantly had to flip back to the beginning of chapters to remember who was narrating.

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