Into The Water.

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CONTAINS SPOILERS

A single mother turns up dead at the bottom of the river that runs through town. Earlier in the summer, a vulnerable teenage girl met the same fate. They are not the first women lost to these dark waters, but their deaths disturb the river and its history, dredging up secrets long submerged. 

Left behind is a lonely fifteen-year-old girl. Parentless and friendless, she now finds herself in the care of her mother’s sister, a fearful stranger who has been dragged back to the place she deliberately ran from—a place to which she vowed she’d never return. 

With the same propulsive writing and acute understanding of human instincts that captivated millions of readers around the world in her explosive debut thriller, The Girl on the Train, Paula Hawkins delivers an urgent, twisting, deeply satisfying read that hinges on the deceptiveness of emotion and memory, as well as the devastating ways that the past can reach a long arm into the present. 

Beware a calm surface—you never know what lies beneath. 

 

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 This wasn’t what I expected, at least not from this author. In 2015, I read The Girl On the Train , and I fell in love with the story, the characters. There wasn’t anything that I didn’t love about that book. I heard about INTO THE WATER In 2018 but did not have a chance to read it until recently. I am not sure if it was because my expectations were high for this book. After all, I loved the other one. I did not dislike the book, but it was not what I expected the book to be. INTO THE WATER started slow and it took some time to get into the story, mostly because they were a lot of characters introduced. I felt as if it might be too many points of view, which got a bit confused at times. On the other hand, I did enjoy reading their stories because all of them had a story to tell, and in a way, we're connected. I don’t know if it was because there were so many characters in the book, but I found it hard to connect to anyone in this book. I didn’t feel that connection that I tend to get with the characters. 

INTO THE WATER wasn’t a bad book, I did not dislike the book, and there were few parts that I found myself unable to pull away from the book. For instance, what happened with Katie. I did wonder why all of a sudden, she ended up doing what she did? Was it to protect Mark, or was there another reason we might not be aware of it? I couldn’t help but wonder that maybe Katie loved Mark more than he loved her. To me, Katie, Lena, and Mark were the most interesting part of the story, they were the most interesting characters even if I couldn’t connect to them either, but it was interesting to read about them. I did wonder what would happen with Mark, and of course, Lena. I did feel that INTO THE WATER did not have as much suspense like Girl On The Train did. The story did not seem to have the same type of mystery feel to it, but seemed more about others, about what they were feeling, or dealing with the event. 

I don’t regret reading this book; I did enjoy most of the aspects of this story. I think I just put high expectations on this book. INTO THE WATER is a book that is worth checking out and giving a chance to. It did keep me on the edge of my seat a few times throughout the story.