Number One Bestseller... God knows why!

Anyone who knows me is aware of the book overload I am subjected to at Christmas. One book I received was The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins; after hearing all the raving reviews, and being a bestseller, I wanted to try it.

Well. There's several hours of my life I'll never get back again.

Where to begin?!

The plot itself, to be fair, was original in terms of presentation: seeing a life through the eyes of a commuter showed the notion of involvement through objectivity, as if watching a scene on TV rather than reality, which provided an element of dimension; this was the only patience I had with the god-awful plot/writing style. The use of distance was used well in terms of proxemics versus the emotional involvement of characters but ultimately it was dull and dragged on. And on. And on a bit more.

The characters had no depth, they were all hideously shallow. Without ruining the ending, those characters included in the 'twist' at the end were miserably predictable and it came from nowhere. To make twists believable, there must be a crescendo, some sort of subtle development throughout the text to make it plausible. Here, apparently Hawkins got bored of writing her endless drivel and decided to end it by picking out a character from a hat to pin the murder on.

The use of short sentences was dismal: never having a sentence with more than 10 words just makes it sound like you can't write properly. The vocabulary, although it shows promise in certain places, was of a primary school standard, and when an interesting word did present itself,  it was usually thrown in to appear intelligent, rather than actually contributing effectively to the text. More often than not, one gets the sense that the author has merely used the 'synonyms' option in Microsoft Word.

Severely unimpressive book. I definitely don't understand the hype surrounding this book, but if you disagree then leave a comment!