Review: Into the Water
“Some of them went into the water willingly and some didn’t . . . Nel Abbott went in fighting.”
Into the Water
I looked forward to reading this book for awhile, and was super excited to get it in my Book of the Month Club box for just $1! I went into it wanting to love it, and expecting to love it, because I really enjoyed The Girl on the Train. Unfortunately, this novel didn’t live up to Girl on the Train status, and really fell flat for me.
Thrillers are a great genre to utilize multiple points of view, and I like that structure, but by page 43 NINE different points of view had already been introduced. This was a bit much, and I found myself constantly flipping back and forth in the book to remind myself who was who, instead of focusing on the story. The chapters also jump around between first and third person for no apparent reason, which is probably a little picky on my part (and pushes a little too hard on my editor nerve), but it was another structural choice that took me out of the narrative a bit. It’s interesting as a writer to get inside the heads of all the characters, and I can appreciate Hawkins’ effort to see the story from the most minor of characters. As a reader, I just don’t care what they all think. I want the plot and the main characters, and maybe a shifty side character or two. This was too much to keep track of.
That being said, I think there’s a great story in the novel, I just don’t think it was as fully developed as it could have been. Woven into part of the novel was a story about a woman who was drowned in 1679 in the Drowning Pool for being a witch. I wanted to read more about that and have more of a parallel between that story and the present day drowning. In the novel’s current state, there were no ties between the drownings, and it could have been left out completely. I wish it had been more of a focus.
The theme of “troublesome women” could have been great too, but it was dissatisfying in the unstructured structure of the novel and got lost in the fray.
Which brings me to the ending. I’m not going to give anything away, but there is a big twist at the end (literally on the last page) and it seemed so forced that it wasn’t shocking. I actually rolled my eyes because it seemed that forced.
I still like Paula Hawkins as an author, and I really believe that with some shrewd editing and restructuring, Into the Water would have been great. As it stands, however, it was a disappointing second novel. It has already been optioned for a film, and hopefully they will fix some of these faults in the theater.