Into the Water by Paula Hawkins

“In the last days before her death, Nel called her sister. Jules didn’t pick up the phone, ignoring her plea for help.

Now Nel is dead. They say she jumped. And Jules has been dragged back to the one place she hoped she had escaped for good, to care for the teenage girl her sister left behind.

But Jules is afraid. So afraid. Of her long-buried memories, of the old Mill House, of knowing that Nel would never have jumped.

And most of all she’s afraid of the water, and the place they call the Drowning Pool . . . “

I absolutely loved The Girl on the Train, so when I heard Paula Hawkins had a new book coming out, I couldn’t wait to pick it up. Unfortunately, I was not a fan of her sophomore novel, Into the Water.

My biggest problem with it was that it was really hard to follow. There were more than POVs throughout the book, and on top of trying to remember who was who and how they were all connected, there were chapters told in the past, and chapters told in the present, and it was just a mess. It was way too hard to follow, especially given that many of the chapters were very short. I really think I would have enjoyed the book more had she stuck with only two or three point of views. I felt that the additional ones didn’t add anything to the story.

The other problem I had with the book was that I felt like there were a few unanswered questions. I won’t spoil anything, but the last sentence of the book didn’t work for me. Other books have done the same thing and left me with an “omg!” reaction, but this didn’t have the same reaction. I wanted to know more about the random psychic character – why bother creating a character that’s “psychic” if you aren’t going to do anything with them? What was the point of showing the chapters from Nel’s book?

Overall, it felt like Hawkins tried to throw too many ideas into one book. I can imagine that after the success of The Girl on the Train that there was likely a lot of pressure for her to come out with a second amazing book, but this one wasn’t it for me. I rated it 2 stars, and that was only because there were 100 or so pages in the middle that actually held my attention. The other 300 pages in the book I had to push myself to get through. All in all, for a book marketed as a thriller, it wasn’t very thrilling. Confusing, convoluted, and predictable, yes. Thrilling, no. I can’t say I’d recommend this one.

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