232. Into the Water
Rating: ☆☆☆
Recommended by:
Author: Paula Hawkins
Genre: Fiction, Mystery, Thriller, Suspense
368 pages, published May 2, 2017
Reading Format: Audio Book
Summary
Summary: Into the Water is a mystery/thriller by Paula Hawkins, author of the wildly successful The Girl on the Train. This book tells the stories of different women, from the days of alleged witchcraft to the present, who died in a place called the Drowning Pool.
Quotes
“Beware a calm surface—you never know what lies beneath.”
“There are people who are drawn to water, who retain some vestigial primal sense of where it flows. I believe that I am one of them. I am most alive when I am near the water, when I am near this water. This is the place where I learned to swim, the place where I learned to inhabit nature and my body in the most joyous and pleasurable way.”
“No one liked to think about the fact that the water in that river was infected with the blood and bile of persecuted women, unhappy women; they drank it every day.”
“Yes, it is. It’s, like, when someone has an affair, why does the wife always hate the other woman? Why doesn’t she hate her husband? He’s the one who’s betrayed her, he’s the one who swore to love her and keep her and whatever forever and ever. Why isn’t he the one who gets shoved off a fucking cliff?”
“We now know that memories are not fixed or frozen, like Proust’s jars of preserves in a larder, but are transformed, disassembled, reassembled, and recategorized with every act of recollection.”
“Watching someone in the throes of raw grief is a terrible thing; the act of watching feels violent, intrusive, a violation. Yet we do it, we have to do it, all the time; you just have to learn to cope with it whatever way you can.”
“She had never realized before her life was torn apart how awkward grief was, how inconvenient for everyone with whom the mourner came into contact. At first it was acknowledged and respected and deferred to. But after a while it got in the way—of conversation, of laughter, of normal life.”
My Take
After thoroughly enjoying The Girl on the Train, I had high hopes for Paula Hawkins follow up effort Into the Water. While Into the Water is not bad, it not nearly as the captivating read of The Girl on the Train. The character development was fine, but the plot and twists were just so-so.
