The Girl on the Train - Paula Hawkins

The Girl on the Train is a psychological thriller set in London and its outskirts. It is bestseller book, so I thought I would give it a try and see what I thought myself.

It is narrated from three different perspectives, thought only one of them belongs to the protagonist - Rachel. She got divorced some years back because of a drinking problem that she developed, which she still has not overcome. Everyday, she takes the same train to go to London and back, even though she also lost her job a couple of months ago because of the same problem. While in the train, every time she observes the houses she passes by, though there's two in particular that she is interested in: her old house, where she used to live with Tom (her ex-husband) and where the latter still lives with her new wife; and one on the same street where a couple that seems perfect to Rachel lives. One day, the woman in the perfect couple disappears. 

The Ruining - Anna Collomore

I will start this review by stating that I find psychological thrillers quite very interesting. I think that novels that take into account the complexity of the human mind and all the problems that this carries along can either be fantastic and blow your mind, or simply just not quite get to you.

The Ruining is about a young girl, Annie Phillips, who moves from Detroit to San Francisco on her first year of university. She has a difficult relationship with her family, so she sort of runs away to the house that will be her home for the rest of the school year - the Cohen family, for whom she will work as a babysitter in order to earn money to pay for her university fees. She is very excited to start over. However, what seems like a dream will not look like so for too long, and everything will turn upside down, and eventually Annie will start wondering whether she's becoming crazy.

In my opinion, The Ruining, by Anna Collomore had all the chances to be a fantastic novel: the plot was interesting, and the way the author treated the psychological part of it was actually pretty decent. However, what made me quite dislike this novel is the writing of the author.  If the writing had been right, she could have written such an amazing novel... 

Let me explain myself. First of all, the length of the book is roughly 300 pages, which is not long enough to develop the plot that the author presents. This causes for the story to go too fast at times and for parts of the book to be unclear, which confuses the reader. Quite a few times I got the feeling that I had skipped parts of the book and found myself going back a few pages, unsuccessfully trying to find answers. Also, I think the way the main character reacts to situations is not believable sometimes. These two points made me consider a couple of times stop reading the book and just forget about it.