Doing book reviews again! This year, I want to read more. Doesn’t matter what; I just want to read. If you have any recommendations, please let me know. Right now, I’m reading anything under the bookshelf of my little sister’s desk (my desk, too!). 

Why this book?

For this book review, I also wished I had the time to watch the movie. In 2016, everybody was talking about this movie. The book was published a year before in January. I watched the film but never bothered to read the book. When I saw this book on my sister’s shelf, I realized that the only thing I remember about the movie was that Emily Blunt, Big Tuna’s wife (oh, you’re not really an Office fan, aren’t you?), played the leading actress. That’s it! That was enough motivation for me to read the book.

Brief description of the plot

Rachel, a 33-year-old woman coping with alcohol, finds herself at the center of the mystery death of a woman. From afar, she used to watch her almost every day through the windows of the train she used to take to get to work. Rachel named her and her partner Jess and Jason and thought of them as the perfect couple, but things were far from perfect in their world, and their destiny was about to take a turn for the worse, with tragic endings.

It’s just so Juicy…

The last time I was at the edge of my seat was in high school while I read The Lake of Darkness. I don’t want to be that person, but I will be that person, and I’m going to say this without any fear of being called a boomer; the book is better than the movie. Maybe it’s because I wanted to remember what the movie was about, or the plot was just that good. The book has 317 pages, and I finished the whole thing in less than two weeks. Keep in mind that I’m a slow reader. The book had blocks of small text, and my mom kept asking how I could read such small letters. Mom, I don’t have bionic eyes; the book made my brain release so much dopamine and oxytocin that I couldn’t keep the thing down.

What I liked the most, and what gave me food for thought for my own writing style, was that the story was being told from the perspective of three women: Rachel, Meghan, and Anna, but Rachel had a more significant portion of the story. I liked everything about this book and tried hard to look for flaws, but I couldn’t find any. 

In each story, there’s an asshole. One or two characters in this story ain’t no exception. They are the only things I disliked, but it wasn’t fair to let that influence my overall experience and rating. 

It was not predictability; I just have a radar for assh*les

At one point, I wanted to look up who was responsible, or what was responsible, for Meghan’s death. I knew there was something about a therapist, but I also know that I was kind of mixing the story a bit with the shitty therapist of the series You. I wouldn’t do no harm to look up who the therapist was. My whole body felt some way when I realized it was no other than Edgar Ramirez, a crush of mine ever since he played Choco in the movie Domino. At that moment, I knew, and it’s just my naïvity tagging along here, that the therapist wasn’t the killer; he couldn’t be. Edgar is like an Apple product in a thriller/horror movie; they can’t make them the villain. Well, I guess I’m shooting myself in the foot here by saying that because who the hell am I kidding? He was one of the villains in Domino; I was just a madly in love teenager with pink glasses.

This story has a huge plot twist, but the villain turned out to be exactly who I thought. Well, I was 99% sure this person was the villain at some point, but I still had half of the book to read. The other 1% of me thought Meghan fell and hit her head on a rock. Meghan’s boyfriend was too obvious, so I ruled him out. I want to make this article spoiler-free, plus I’ve written more than I anticipated. I wanted to share my thoughts briefly and convince you to read the book. Did I do it? Did I spark your curiosity? 

If you’ve read this book or watched the movie(s), please share your thoughts.