The Girl On the Train

This is a thriller and yet it was hard to put down. But somehow the characters were never felt real. They - all the three women - were drinking, flirting, and meddling with others lives really. Especially Rachel, the protagonist was hard for me to understand. She was clearly getting into problems as if by choice and looks like she would rather borrow money from her old mother than really look for work though she has been unemployed for such a long time. All the three women, it felt, were lost morally and otherwise in their lives. May be I am making too much of a moral judgment here but for me to feel their pain, or their struggle, I needed to understand where they were coming from. I just felt like smacking them out of their self-important role and get real through out the book.

On the positive side, it is a page-turner and has an interesting ending. I still have hard time figuring out why a book like this would be on best seller list though.