Book Review: The Girl On The Train

Is "Diary Narratives" the chic of novel writing now?  Like the book "Gone Girl", the story of this novel is told in the form of  diary entries.  After "Gone Girl"  I found myself reading the troubled marriage of another sad woman again.  Is marital trouble going to be the inspiration and the foundation of all the best-selling novels from now on??  The fact that this type of topics is the mainstream tastes of the readers, is starting to feel a little disturbing to me.  What does this kind of taste profile tell about the readers or the women today?  I suppose most of the readers of this book are females.  What are the women going through in their real lives now that they enjoy reading this type of story?  What do you think?  I don't know what to think of it. This book just makes me sad.  After all,   I can only read so many novels based on a sad woman in a sad marriage.  Why am I spending time and money on reading something that makes me sad?  "Gone Girl" was okay to me because at least the woman was smart and she was in control.  I read this book because it receives such good reviews.  I read it because I got sucked into the "herd" effect.   To me, the main character Rachel is a very sad woman, and she is quite passive aggressive.  She is so sad that it's hard for me to keep motivated to follow her train rides day in and day out.  But I pushed myself through because I thought I was going to be rewarded in the end if I hanged on to her boring train rides to the final destination where all wrongs would be righted, where she would snap out of her sad life and find salvation.  But in the end, I was disappointed to realize that the finale of her sad train ride would give her so much trauma that she may never be able to snap out of it, given her inability to deal with the earlier blows before her train journey.  Even the book didn't talk about it much, anyone who experienced what Rachael experienced in the end of the book is going to be haunted for the rest of her life. 

Whatever happened to Rachael before she shared her diary with me was sad enough, and bad enough, but the ending of the story would top all Rachael's miseries. It was a finale of the worst fate that she was unfortunately casted in. Having experienced a bad marriage is bad enough, but what Rachael experienced in the end will certainly not help pave an easier path for her to move on.  The end of the book wasn't a closure to Rachael's unsettling problems that destroyed her.  It was just another blast of cruelty that life had unfairly tossed onto Rachael once again. Only this time, there will be no hope for any closure, there will never be closure. It will forever be the tragedy that Rachael will never be able to forget.

While the book made me sad, the story was nevertheless creative and suspenseful.  

Whiteout by Ken Follett

To many of us, Christmas is the same good old time in the year when we gather with our family to enjoy the same old tradition. But to the imagination of this book's author, Christmas can be the perfect time for all hells to break loose. During their family gathering for Christmas, the characters in this book all got stung emotionally, punched physically and they almost got wiped off the face of the earth. It was interesting to read how the author created a story by combining terriorism, Christmas, family feuds, bio-hazzard, home invasion, and romance. It's a story where everything just went terribly wrong for one single family. There were some humors during the ordeal that the characters went through and there were lots of chaos towards the end of the book where everybody was trapped in the same space, confronting each other, fighting for their dear life. The book was a little slow and boring to me in the first half, but it became more interesting in the last half.