Paula Hawkins | Into The Water

The memory is a funny thing. For instance, I will forget things said or events over time. One thing I have yet to forget was the first time I read "The Girl on the Train" by Paula Hawkins. It was January 2015 and a cold miserable snowy Sunday. I was ravenous with that book. I devoured every character, every word, and every page hungrier than I was when I picked it up. Since then, I have read the book another two times. I am obsessed. I've watched the movie countless times as well.

Cue to two and a half years later and Hawkins has released her second novel, "Into The Water". I quickly pre-orderd and couldn't wait to get this in my hands. The wait was by far worth it. 

Plot:

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.

Review:

I'll admit, I was a little nervous starting this one. I couldn't imagine having to top TGOTT and I had read some not so favorable reviews about how this fell flat and one of my favorite bloggers called it "the book that I thought would never end."

Yikes.

I saved this one for my last read of May from my TBR pile and quickly regretted it. While I admit I have a tendency to save the best for last, the moment I began this one, I realized that I was going to be enthralled. I was right. 

This one starts off with a girl being tortured and thrown in to the water that would take on a character of it's own. It was like being slapped in the face when you expect a warm hug. I was shocked and immediately haunted by the ominous presence of this water known to be a magnet for troubled women. 

The story then picks up with Jules Abbott coming to her fifteen year old nieces rescue after her mother is found murdered. Jules and her sister, Nel had had a rocky relationship from an event that happened when both were teenagers. 

In similar fashion to TGOTT, Hawkins does a fantastic job of switching between character perspectives of a whopping eleven characters who are all related to or know something different of our infamous Nel Abbott. These characters were flawed, hateful or lovable, and jumped off the pages right into your face. I was obsessed.

One thing I loved about this read was that Nel Abbott was working on a piece of work titled "The Drowning Pool" about the troubled women that this river has literally gobbled up, including her daughters best friend and also a DI's mother. While not only does this novel switch between the character perspectives mentioned above, you also get pieces of Nel's writing of the women in the past and what she believes or has heard had happened trailing all the way back to the 1600s. This was done so well that I wish I could get my hands on the full manuscript of "The Drowning Pool" and I would have gobbled that up too.

Now, "The Drowning Pool" was so haunting in such a different way that it brought up the mystifying atrocities that occurred during witch hunts in the past. Witch. Hunts. This was darkly spooky, ominous, and effective. 

Each chapter ends with such a cliffhanger or a sense of urgency, that when I began, I had to stop myself at 100 pages due to...well, work. The second time I picked it up, I didn't stop. I loved how it switched from one characters perspective to another, often in the same time. This was done flawlessly, as was everything else in this twisted tale.

The ending was incredibly well done. I mean, I couldn't stop guessing and was gasping for air by the end of it. This ending will stay with me for a long time. A very, very long  time.

So, did this trump TGOTT? I don't know. Do I love TGOTT more than Into The Water? I don't know. What I do know is it's quite possible that I love them both equally as they are both very different pieces of work. I will be enjoying this one time and time again as I did with Hawkins first novel. While the mind is a tricky thing, I won't be forgetting this one.

Rating: 5/5