The Girl On The Tree

by Paula Hawkins

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The Girl On The Tree by Paula Hawkins

Released: January 13, 2015

Pages: 325

Publisher: Riverhead Books

Overall: 3/5

Plot: 3.5/5

Characters: 1/5

Setting & World-building: 2/5

Emotional Investment: 4/5

"I have lost control of everything, even the places in my head"

Ummm, apparently this is supposed to be a hyped book. I, unfortunately, did not feel any of that so-called 'hype'.

Quick Summary: Rachel takes the same commute to work and back every single day. On her way she always passes by a house with a couple that fascinates her- "Jess and Jason" she names them. She even feels like she knows them from their happily couple encounters. She also yearns to feel that sense of happiness again but she is content just knowing they are happy. Until she sees something shocking. Something that lasted less than a minute, but it was enough to shatter her world and get her involved in the lives of strangers.

I hated all the characters in this book. Every single one of them pissed me off. Rachel is an alcoholic, who is still obsessed with her ex-husband. She does a lot of sketchy things in this book, that I would get a restraining order on her for. Taking a child???? Like nothing she does is even relatively sane. She also stalks people, like I get staring out a window and seeing people but the fact she has created entire backstories for them is crazy. And then she uses that backstory as evidence to police like you don't actually know a person from just watching them for 2 minutes every day. Also, I know alcoholism is difficult but she knows how horrible her actions and then does nothing. She straight-up vomited on her roommate's floor and then didn't clean it up. I would scream.

Tom is Rachel's ex-husband and he lives close to "Jess and Jasons" house with the woman he cheated on her with, Anna. He was just a crappy person which everyone could tell from the beginning. He just seemed too nice and then all his lies starting to catch up to him. Anna was just borderline insane. Anytime Rachel came to their area to visit "Jason" (whose actual name is Scott), she would get all crazy. She would be like "OMG she's attacking me" and I was just so annoyed. She couldn't get over herself enough to notice she ruined a marriage and that maybe Rachel might not be existing for her. Oh and Anna literally said, "getting with a married man is turn-on". Like wtf? Who says that?

Now the plot had so much potential. At some point, my anger towards the characters clouded any appreciation I may have for the plot. Most of the plot is literally just Rachel meddling. She is a literal stranger it's not even like "The Woman in the Window" where she lives in the same neighborhood. She literally sees them in passing on the train and now she's like I'm going to involve myself in everyone's business. Also, the whole alcoholism-induced heroine is overused. Why is that everyone's go-to? It's so much more exciting to read if the heroine has a different personality trait other than being an alcoholic.

AHH, I actually hated all the characters. The police sucked. "Jess and Jason" both were awful people. All the men are horrible people. Assualt is so common in this book. It kind of just dropped out of nowhere all the characters and plot twists. I didn't feel like there was any foreshadowing whatsoever.

I really don't recommend this book to anyone. I mean I could see the intended effect but I totally missed it. Maybe this book works for others but me, nahh.

Quotes

"There's something comforting about the sight of strangers safe at home"

"Life is not a paragraph, and death is no parenthesis"

"A tiding of magpies. One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl, four for a boy, five for silver, six for gold, seven for a secret never to be told"