Into the Water

Author: Paula Hawkins
Genre: fiction, suspense

       This is not the first book of Paula Hawkins that I read. I did read ‘Girl on the Train’ and didn’t like it much. However, I decided to take my chances with her again without having too many expectations. At the end of this book though, I decided that I wouldn’t read any more of her work.

        First of all, a book that does not have a good end, is not a good book. It usually doesn’t matter that the content before was excellent or how well it was written, if the end does not give you closure, all the pages before are almost a waste. This is especially important when it comes to thrillers and suspense stories, where everything unfurls in the end and where the reader discovers whether all that they were suspecting was right or not. I feel that it is here that she fails the most. With the previous books, I had already predicted the plot which was simple enough. In this book, she seems to have tried to compensate for the previous one by making it overly complicated and confusing from the start. The book is written from the perspective of many people; a little too many. As a result it takes a lot of time to figure out all the characters and their relationship to each other. There are too many things going on, suicides and murders, witchcraft some which are not properly explained even in the end. The writing style is good enough and the story runs fast, which was the only reason I carried on till the end.

        However, the end was anti-climactic.  The reason being that the build-up throughout the book does not quite live up to the end and again the end was a bit predictive for me. Also, the ending did not really give me much closure and I felt that there were more explanations required. Overall, I wouldn’t call it a bad book but I wouldn’t call it a really good one either. It’s definitely something you can pass over if you have better things to read.