Title: Into the Water
Author: Paula Hawkins
Type: Fiction
Page Count/Review Word Count: 360
Rating: 3/5
Well, I had mixed feelings about this one, although at least I was more favourably disposed towards it than I was to The Girl on the Train, which is the book that established her reputation as a thriller writer to watch.
This one basically revolves around a suspicious death that took place in a deep pool of water in an English village. The pool is almost a character of its own, as is the village, and both the pool and the village also have rich histories that are slowly revealed as the story progresses.
My big problem is that there are too many characters with too many different points of view, and we keep jumping from one to another. I wouldn’t mind if there were two or three, but it gets to the point where it’s feeling like a Game of Thrones novel, or like Game of Thrones would read if there were POV chapters from minor characters like servants and groundskeepers.
As if the sheer number of points of view wasn’t already a problem, they also feel pretty samey. When we go from one character to another, you can tell that the same writer created their narratives because they don’t feel different. It’s almost as though all of the characters think in the same way. They’re all the same character.
But that’s the thing, because they’re not. The way that they actually act is the true test of what a character is like, and everyone has their own agency and even their own ways of talking. That’s what’s so weird about all of the different points of view.
If you took out the POVs, this would be a pretty good book, with most of the value and intrigue coming from the pool and the way that it lurks in the background throughout the novel like a ghost that you can’t get rid of. It’s the pool that could elevate this from being just another thriller, but it’s fighting a losing battle against all of the other stuff.
