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Into The Water

By paula hawkins, a convoluted and problematic mystery.

So, I have lots of thoughts about Into the Water by Paula Hawkins. There’s spoilers ahead (at the end), but I’ll warn you before they start.

Plot Summary (No Spoilers)

For the Detailed Plot Summary, click here or scroll all the way down .

The town of Beckford is known as a suicide spot. Its Drowning Pool is a place where many people have committed suicide and where other deaths have occurred over the years. When Jules she receives word that her long-estranged sister has been found dead there, she has no choice but to venture back to a place she never wanted to return to.

The police are quick to categorize the death as a “jumper,” but Jules knows that the circumstances of her sister’s death are suspicious, to say the least. To find out what happened to her sister that night, Jules will have to go back into the history of the Drowning Pool and discover the secrets that the many people in this town keep.

Book Review (No Spoilers)

So, Into The Water is primarily about the investigation into a death that occurs at the “Drowning Pool”, a part of a river that lies underneath a cliff where many deaths have occurred over the years. But the Drowning Pool’s storied history quickly comes into play, and the circumstances surrounding a number of other deaths come into question as well.

As a result, in order to tell this story and the many other stories that tie into it, there are a lot of characters and points of views that are brought in. To complicate things, as this is a mystery, there are, of course, a ton of misunderstandings and a pieces of false information and misleading statements that serve as red herrings cropping up as well.

As a result, a lot, a lot is going on in this book. It is, arguably, is a little hard to follow. Not in an unreasonable way, but you might need to read this a little slower than is typical for a thriller.

In general, I found it better written than your typical mystery-thriller. It doesn’t feel like something Hawkins plotted and then just banged out quickly. Instead, the writing feel intentional, and I liked that the characters acted based on the motivations that make sense their personality (as opposed to some thrillers where everyone’s only motivation is to act in furtherance of the plot).

I also thought it was nice how much thought had been put into the message that the book wanted to impart about the Drowning Pool and the way society treats troublesome women, though some may find this a little preachy.

Book Review: Some Criticisms (No Spoilers)

In terms of the twists and turns, that’s where things started to break down for me. There’s a ton of them in general. If you love mysteries where there are a lot of red herrings and false turns, then you might like this book. However, I got a little impatient after a while since at some point the plot just feels very “messy”. There’s just a ton of false information and a lot of cryptic statements.

If you read her novel The Girl on the Train , this book is very different from that. The Girl on the Train is much more tightly plotted. Most of the information you get comes into play and you’re just trying to figure out how the pieces fit. In Into the Water , there’s just an onslaught stuff and so much of what you’re “told” is false, so figuring out the ending is just guesswork. In a tightly plotted thriller, only a few specific sets of circumstances can “explain” everything. In a messy thriller, it’s just a matter of who the author chooses at the end.

I also personally hate those cheesy moments when the author fakes you out to make you think something dramatic has happened, but actually it’s nothing. Thriller writers seem to love these, but I can’t stand them. There’s a ton of that in here.

Read it or Skip it? (No Spoilers)

The book is a suspenseful and twisty one, and the writing is solid. It’s a little hard to follow, but definitely not impossible. If you go in knowing you’ll need to concentrate a little, you’ll be fine.

Towards the end, I was a little tired of all the red herrings (so much of this book is just a ton of red herrings) and the convoluted plot, but overall I was entertained by it even if I didn’t find it entirely satisfying.

However, this book is a hard “skip it” for me, because I can’t possibly recommend it due to an issue I have regarding the substance of the book. It’s a medium-ish spoiler (it gets revealed about half-way through), so I’m not going to spoil that detail for anyone who wants to read it. But suffice to say, I personally am not able to recommend this book to anyone.

Spoilers start here. It’s not a major spoiler, I don’t think, but it is a spoiler. I’m really only revealing one plot point, so it won’t ruin the book for you. But out of respect for anyone who hates any type of spoiler, proceed with caution!

Also, if you’re looking for the Detailed Plot Summary, click here or scroll all the way down .

Spoiler-ish Thoughts ( Spoilers )

Towards the end, the book starts trying to convince us that Katie (a 15-year-old child) and Mark (a 29 year-old-man) were genuinely “in love” which I cannot possibly even remotely understand why she tries to do that. It’s one thing for Mark to think it, since obviously he’s a delusional pedophile, but for Lena to think so too makes me think that Hawkins seems to think that teachers preying on their students is okay?

I considered that perhaps Hawkins didn’t really mean that (since it’s a character saying it, not her), but the rest of the book is so explicitly preachy about stuff, that it seems weird she wouldn’t at least reference the fact the an adult teacher sleeping with a child is completely wrong no matter what, despite what the characters think.

I really, really, really could not get behind this idea that Mark and Katie being together was somehow “true love”. It’s not.

There’s a whole two chapters where it’s just Lena justifying the relationship between Mark and Katie, saying that he’s just a “sad old man” (“You don’t understand, he wasn’t some, like, evil sexual predator. He was just a sad old man”) and like oh, at least he didn’t attack me, he’s not like that (“She seemed to think that Mark had assaulted me, like she maybe thought he was some sort of pervert who couldn’t keep his hands off teenage girls.”), etc. Plus her whole bit about them belonging together (“There’s a tiny, twisted part of me that sort of wishes I believed in an afterlife, and that the two of them could pick up again there, and maybe things might be all right for them, and she’d be happy. As much as I hate him, I’d like to think that somehow Katie could be happy”).

A guy who sleeps with children is not just a “sad old man”, they’re 100% evil predator. Just because he “only” sleeps with one child doesn’t make him any less of a pervert, he is 100% a pervert who couldn’t keep his hands off teenage girls. Seriously, Paula Hawkins? WTF? I feel pretty confident any child that’s been molested doesn’t think that the perpetrator is any less evil because they were the only one it happened to.

Anyone old enough to be out of college that’s convinced that their soul mate is anyone in high school (or younger) needs therapy. I don’t care if you think you love them and they love you back. That child doesn’t know any better, and you’re a predator. Full stop, no exclusions.

The fact that he just leaves town at the end is not an acceptable conclusion. He belongs in jail. That resolution seems to imply that the only issue is how society views their relationship, not the fact that he’s a child molester.

It bothers me even more because it feels like Hawkins seems so intentional in this book about the message she wants to impart about women and how they get treated by society. Anyway, I don’t get what happened here, but I just can’t recommend this book.

(P.S. There are some thoughtful and carefully considered comments below that have a different take than mine, and I encourage you to take a look at the great discussion below!)

Detailed Book Summary (Spoilers)

Prologue (libby).

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19 comments

Share your thoughts cancel reply.

I have lots of thoughts regarding this book. I expect a lot since I love The Girl On The Train and directly pick up this book thinking it would be the same. Turns out, The Girl On The Train is waaayy better than this.

yeah, I really liked the Girl on the Train too so I was surprised by this book! I just felt like the two of them were so different.

I thought this book was so bad that I gave up after a third. So I didn’t get to the spoiler part, but I’m even more glad I didn’t read on!

haha totally understandable :)

Yea my mom couldn’t even finish it

interesting review this is probably a skip for me

thank you! haha yeah I wasn’t a fan :/

Yea I wouldn’t recommend it to be honest! And I loved girl on the train as well

I read this, and I will have to admit, my thoughts were the exact same as yours. I reviewed it on my blog as well.

i’m glad it wasn’t just me — thanks for reading! :)

Wow. That is a very thorough review. Thanks! I will put this one on my list.

thanks rosi! and thanks for reading!

Red herrings and abhorrent behaviour treated as okay? Not okay.

I still haven’t read The Girl On The Train, nor watched the movie.

yeeaaah I didn’t love this book — the girl in the train is better though the movie isn’t great :/

I was wondering if she was writing the part of a 15 yo girl really well, but this is making me rethink and it’s making me feel very uncomfortable. It does make me wonder about Paula Hawkins though if she really truly does believe this? What’s her story? What happened to her for her to be thinking this way? Or is she simply those annoying ‘forgive and love them all, even the paedophiles’ people? So many questions. Sometimes I wonder if art can cause problems sometimes, especially given how popular Lolita is.

Regarding the Mark/Katie affair:

It’s completely realistic for both Katie and Mark to think they are “really in love”. It’s arguably less realistic for Lena to share the same sentiment, but don’t forget that Lena is herself a teenager. Other characters (Jules, Louise, Erin) present far different perspectives on the affair.

Given the general contempt Paula Hawkins has for the Mark Henderson character, I don’t think it’s fair to say that she approves of this relationship. Even Lena, who arguably thinks the love is real, protests that Mark didn’t deserve Katie.

I like this book a bit better than Girl on the Train, but that relates in part to the fact I saw the movie first. Compared to the movie, the book is very hard to follow, and having an alcoholic as a narrator is not all that much fun. This book goes much further in terms of having multiple narrators, and I understand that can be confusing at first. (I experienced this story as an audio book and I have to admit that I had to re-listen to the first CD a couple times before I figured out what was going on. In particular it took a while for me to figure out that Louise and Jules were separate people.)

I disagree with commenters who think Hawkins is in any way soft on the aspect of pedophilia here. Hawkins makes it perfectly clear that Mark Henderson’s selfishness and irresponsibility did untold damage to a lot of people’s lives, including destroying Katie entirely. He may have “escaped justice” but I don’t see a single character saying his actions were “OK”. To the contrary, Lena in particular was in a murderous rage and may have arranged for a “Hard Candy”-style ending for him.

(Hard Candy is an early movie by Ellen Page and I strongly recommend it for a completely different take on this kind of issue. Having said that, it’s far less realistic than this story.)

Rick, thank you for your interesting and thoughtful comments! It’s funny, I started it out as an audiobook too which is why I think it was confusing at first. I ended up switching over to book form which was easier to follow.

I have to disagree though, particularly with Lena’s take on Mark. I didn’t see much of a rage from her — she initially attacks him because she thought he killed her mother. After she finds out that’s not true, then she just runs away. After the dust settles, she even hopes that they (Mark and Katie) can be together in the afterlife. To me, that seems incredibly soft on his behavior.

I’m not sure I agree with this blog – all respect intended though!!! It is refreshing to see a different opinion from mine! I can agree with some points in this but others I have to disagree. It all comes down to personal interests, taste, and what the individual would find to be fulfilling. For me, I loved this book! I loved the twists and turns and the “hard to keep up” parts. I loved this because it was even more engaging, it was a book that made you keep up and read between the lines and connect the dots for yourself. I loved the pain and the heart retching bits about mistakes and past events that we cannot do anything about anymore. I love to read my books slowly so I can feel the true emotion of each character. Again, this is all just pure personal preferences.

On the pedophilia content: I have to agree with Rick – another commenter – and say that Hawkins did not condone this kind of behavior between the two. I feel that Lena did not believe it was true love. I believe she saw it – as I do – an “in the moment lust affair” between two people. Those two people being a minor and adult. I do not condone this either. I do not believe it is the right, nor natural. I believe that Katie was caught up in her teenage angst and mistook it for love while Mark was getting his rocks off. I do not think Lena saw it as okay and she was clear that she cared about Katie so much and said over and over again about how she cared about her feelings – even in death. The bit about how if there was an afterlife, she hoped Mark and Katie could be together, I take that as purely thinking about Katie and how she just wants her to be happy – whether it be right or wrong. I mean, Lena is no saint herself trying to seduce her teachers and taking Josh (twelve years old) to break windows of Marks house and what not.

One other thing: I think Lena was enraged with Mark as she went to his house and attacked him for how he tore their lives apart. Only after the bracelet fell did Lena become overtaken with sadness, anger, misunderstanding, that she was brought to kill this man. I saw it as the last straw. I think she thought “He took my best friend and now my mother…I’m gonna kill this guy.”

I also know that the writer behind is all is to be accounted for as she is the one that came up with everything. So, I do not believe she was saying what Katie and Mark were doing was okay.

Thank you again for sharing your opinions! I can appreciate it!! <3

I agree with this review more than the blog review.

(“There’s a tiny, twisted part of me that sort of wishes I believed in an afterlife, and that the two of them could pick up again there, and maybe things might be all right for them, and she’d be happy. As much as I hate him, I’d like to think that somehow Katie could be happy”).

Is it just me who thinks Lena killed Mark before she left the cabin? Or is it just wishful thinking?

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Into the Water review: Paula Hawkins returns with another 'grey-toned' mystery

A gone girl; a murky past; a slippery, grey-toned mystery: The last time Paula Hawkins tumbled down this rabbit hole, 20 million readers (and a major movie adaptation ) followed. Inevitably, Into the Water arrives with both the burden and privilege of association with one of the biggest pop-literary bombshells of the last decade, and it takes care not to stray far from the moody, through-a-glass-darkly universe The Girl on the Train conjured so vividly.

Here though, the canvas has been greatly expanded; Water pours on no less than 14 narrators, all residents of an otherwise bucolic village in Northern England whose river claims an unusual number of female victims. Were the two most recent — a popular, seemingly untroubled teenager and a fortyish single mother with a not-small list of local enemies — simple suicides? Or is the more sinister truth, as more than one character notes, that Beckford is “a place to get rid of troublesome women”?

The book’s piled-on storylines lack the feverish, almost subdermal intimacy of Train , and Hawkins’ pulp psychology has only the soggiest sort of logic. Still, buried in her humid narrative is an intriguing pop-feminist tale of small-town hypocrisy, sexual politics, and wrongs that won’t rinse clean. B-

ADMIN AREA MY BOOKSHELF MY DASHBOARD MY PROFILE SIGN OUT SIGN IN

INTO THE WATER

by Paula Hawkins ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 2, 2017

Let's call it sophomore slump and hope for better things.

Women in a small British town have been drowning since 1679.

“No one liked to think about the fact that the water in that river was infected with the blood and bile of persecuted women, unhappy women; they drank it every day.” So sayeth the town psychic in Hawkins’ ( The Girl on the Train , 2015) follow-up to her smash-hit debut. Unfortunately, there’s nothing here to match the sharp characterization of the alcoholic commuter at the center of that story. Here the central character—Danielle Abbott, an award-winning writer and photographer who's also the single mother of a teenager—has already died. At the time of her watery demise, she was working on a coffee-table book about the spot the people of Beckford call the Drowning Pool, once her “place of ecstasy,” where she learned to swim, now her grave. She left behind a pile of typewritten pages and a daughter whose best friend also drowned just a few months ago. Danielle's estranged sister, Jules, returns to town to identify the body, relive the distressing past that led her to flee this creepy place, and try to deal with her snotty, grieving niece, Lena. Many of the neighbor families are also down a member via the pool, and even after you’ve managed to untangle all the willfully misleading information, half-baked subplots, and myriad characters, you’re going to have a tough time keeping it straight. The spunkiest voice belongs to a somewhat tangential policewoman who probably should have been the narrator. “Seriously,” she comments, “how is anyone supposed to keep track of all the bodies around here? It’s like Midsomer Murders , only with accidents and suicides and grotesque historical misogynistic drownings instead of people falling into the slurry or bashing each other over the head.”

Pub Date: May 2, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-7352-1120-9

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Riverhead

Review Posted Online: Feb. 6, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017

SUSPENSE | THRILLER | SUSPENSE | PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLER | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE

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BOOK REVIEW

by Paula Hawkins

Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

New York Times Bestseller

by Max Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2020

A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.

Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z (2006).

A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.

Pub Date: June 16, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine

Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020

GENERAL SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | SCIENCE FICTION

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by Max Brooks

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BOOK TO SCREEN

THEN SHE WAS GONE

by Lisa Jewell ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 24, 2018

Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.

Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.

Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s ( I Found You , 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.

Pub Date: April 24, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Atria

Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018

GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | SUSPENSE | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | SUSPENSE

More by Lisa Jewell

by Lisa Jewell

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The Travel Bug Bite

A bug-biting book-binging blogger bitten by the travel bug!

Into the Water by Paula Hawkins: Book Review

Into the Water by Paula Hawkins is the second book I’ve read by this author. My first, of course, was Girl on the Train . It was the first book I read with so many twists, and I was super excited to read more by Paula Hawkins. The first time I tried to read it, I was mostly reading on my commute to work. There are a lot of characters and after reading a third of the book, I ended up putting it down, bored.

Over a year later, I decided to give it a second chance. Despite remembering parts of it, I started again from page one and I read it in a day. Overall, I enjoyed the book and there was one twist in particular that was moving. But it is nothing like Girl on the Train , not that Paula Hawkins ever claimed it to be similar. That being said, I couldn’t help give this book four of out of five stars because to me it lacked the oomph of a fantastic book.

Into the Water by Paula Hawkins Synopsis

“A single mother turns up dead at the bottom of the river that runs through town. Earlier in the summer, a vulnerable teenage girl met the same fate. They are not the first women lost to these dark waters, but their deaths disturb the river and its history, dredging up secrets long submerged. Left behind is a lonely fifteen-year-old girl. Parentless and friendless, she now finds herself in the care of her mother’s sister, a fearful stranger who has been dragged back to the place she deliberately ran from—a place to which she vowed she’d never return. With the same propulsive writing and acute understanding of human instincts that captivated millions of readers around the world in her explosive debut thriller, The Girl on the Train , Paula Hawkins delivers an urgent, twisting, deeply satisfying read that hinges on the deceptiveness of emotion and memory, as well as the devastating ways that the past can reach a long arm into the present. Beware a calm surface—you never know what lies beneath.” Goodreads

What I Loved

I really loved the character development. The focus of the book really seemed to be on the characters themselves and not the twists that are normally expected in a book like this. There were so many different personalities, all learning and growing in their own ways. All of their questions, problems and mysteries revolve around the river that runs through their town. I do love how all the complex stories were tied together. I also loved the twists – even the one that is haunting, but that’s the whole point.

What I Didn’t Love

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what I didn’t love about this book. It ended up being great, just slower than Girl on the Train and less shocking. There was a lot more subtly with Into the Water that required patience, which isn’t my strong suit. The harsh critics on Goodreads seem to agree with my rating and it seems that people who actually gave it a chance, did enjoy it to a certain extent. Most of the bad reviews compare it to one of the best psychological thrillers ever, so that’s not really fair.

I’d like to compare the pace of this book to Just Take My Heart by Marry Higgins Clark . I also had a similar issue of taking a while to remember who everyone was. Especially since I read it in just one day, I don’t think I’ll remember the names of the characters even next week. That being said, the story itself is definitely memorable and that one twist will stay in my mind forever.

Summary: Into the Water by Paula Hawkins

Into the Water by Paula Hawkins is a good book as long as you don’t compare it to Girl on the Train . It has a lot of depth, character twists that are painful rather than shocking. If you’re like me, you’ll need to be a certain kind of mood to enjoy a book like this. However, if you give it a chance, you will definitely enjoy it! Grab a copy on Amazon (#affiliate) and start reading!

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The Girl on the Train author Paula Hawkins’ new thriller: Into the Water, review

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There’s no doubt that Into the Water will sell a lot of copies. Like Paula Hawkins’ 2015 hit The Girl On the Train , this, her second thriller, is one that will appear on those “beach reads” round-ups and stick around on bestseller stands at airports for months to come. Then, just when even your friend who “doesn’t do books” has read it, the film will come out – the rights have already been sold – and it will start again, this time with a Hollywood A-Lister on the cover. But is it any good? Well, I won’t deny that I was semi-gripped. Not quite still-reading-it-on-the-Tube-escalator gripped, but sufficiently so that I eschewed company at lunchtime for a few days to finish it.

It’s a shame then that I expect I won’t be the only reader who got to the end and found it hard to care about the final reveal, mostly because it’s hard to keep track of and emotionally invest in the myriad of characters.

Into the Water is set in the fictional town of Beckford, Northumberland, and unlike Hawkins’ small cast in TGOTT , which was limited to the inhabitants of a couple of houses, this covers a whole community. It’s told from 11 different perspectives, confusingly, some in the first and others in the third person. The majority of the chapters follow the fallout after the death of Danielle “Nel” Abbott in August 2015. She apparently jumped to her death into the so-called Drowning Pool, a spot that has been the location of a number of “suicides” over the years, and that was the subject of Nel’s latest photography book – and obsession. She believed that, rather than suicide, there was something more sinister going on, that Beckford was "a place to get rid of troublesome women”. There are also flashbacks to Nel and sister Julia’s teenage years, when an overweight 13-year-old Julia – now slimmed down and re-branded as “Jules” – was much mocked by her glamorous, popular older sister. Interspersed are the stories of the historical deaths at the pool, as well as an excerpt from Nel’s unpublished tome.

Those we get the closest to are Jules and Nel’s rebellious 15-year-old daughter, Lena. We also frequently hear from Sean, the detective assigned to his case, who has his own tragic connection with the Drowning Pool. There is not much light in this book. All the families have been touched by tragedy, including the Whittakers, whose daughter Katie, Lena’s best friend, seemingly took her own life in the pool a couple of months before. The men are universally nasty – rapists, adulterers, paedophiles, killers, all liars – and the women are unlikeable for the most part. And I may have been watching too much Line of Duty , but it feels like you can’t trust any coppers anymore. There are two dodgy ones in this: Sean and his cat-killing father Patrick. As with The Girl on the Train , and the whole “grip-lit” genre, the reader has learnt to trust no narrator and that clues will be so buried you will almost definitely miss them.

Into the Water is ambitious in scope. Hawkins has talked in interviews about how she wants to probe familial and sibling relationships, as well as unreliable memory. Big, interesting themes, none of which are given enough pages. The desire to build suspense and feed us red herrings is detrimental to character development. Jules and Lena might be the characters we have the best sense of here, but even their voices aren’t distinct enough – they all blur into one. It also doesn’t help that there is a pervading theme of supernatural, in the form of local psychic Nickie Sage, perhaps intended as another red herring, but a turn-off for any fans of empirical evidence.

The plot was as twisting as Beckford’s gloomy river, but by the time I got to the final turn, on the very last page, I felt I would need to go back to the beginning to make sense of it all. A good beach read, yes, but one that you may have forgotten by the time you’ve come back from your next dip in the sea.

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Book summary and reviews of Into the Water by Paula Hawkins

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Into the Water

by Paula Hawkins

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Genre: Thrillers
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Book summary.

An addictive new novel of psychological suspense from the author of #1 New York Times bestseller and global phenomenon The Girl on the Train

"Hawkins is at the forefront of a group of female authors—think Gillian Flynn and Megan Abbott—who have reinvigorated the literary suspense novel by tapping a rich vein of psychological menace and social unease… there's a certain solace to a dark escape, in the promise of submerged truths coming to light." — Vogue A single mother turns up dead at the bottom of the river that runs through town. Earlier in the summer, a vulnerable teenage girl met the same fate. They are not the first women lost to these dark waters, but their deaths disturb the river and its history, dredging up secrets long submerged. Left behind is a lonely fifteen-year-old girl. Parentless and friendless, she now finds herself in the care of her mother's sister, a fearful stranger who has been dragged back to the place she deliberately ran from—a place to which she vowed she'd never return. With the same propulsive writing and acute understanding of human instincts that captivated millions of readers around the world in her explosive debut thriller, The Girl on the Train , Paula Hawkins delivers an urgent, twisting, deeply satisfying read that hinges on the deceptiveness of emotion and memory, as well as the devastating ways that the past can reach a long arm into the present. Beware a calm surface—you never know what lies beneath.

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"Hawkins may be juggling a few too many story lines for comfort, but the payoff packs a satisfying punch." - Publishers Weekly "The spunkiest voice belongs to a somewhat tangential policewoman who probably should have been the narrator. 'Seriously," she comments, "how is anyone supposed to keep track of all the bodies around here? It's like Midsomer Murders, only with accidents and suicides and grotesque historical misogynistic drownings instead of people falling into the slurry or bashing each other over the head.' Let's call it sophomore slump and hope for better things." - Kirkus "Starred Review. Hawkins returns to the rotating-narration style of her breakout debut, giving voice to an even broader cast this time… Order by the ton." - Booklist "Succulent new mystery... Hawkins, influenced by Hitchcock, has a cinematic eye and an ear for eerie, evocative language... So do dive in. The payoff is a socko ending. And a noirish beach read that might make you think twice about dipping a toe in those dark, chilly waters." - USA Today "Highly suspenseful... all these intrigues are teased out with impressive skill by Ms. Hawkins, who tells a complex narrative...in a chronicle whose final pages yield startling revelations." - Wall Street Journal "If you prefer your page-turners with a heart of darkness, then consider Paula Hawkins's follow-up to her much-lauded Girl on the Train ... Hawkins constructs a bracing, knotty ride in which the ghosts of the past come back to haunt those living in the present." - W Magazine "There's no denying that when it comes to tension you could cut with a knife, no one does it better than Hawkins." - New York Post

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Paula Hawkins worked as a journalist for fifteen years before turning her hand to fiction. She lives in London. The Girl on the Train is her first thriller. It is being published all over the world and has been optioned by Dreamworks

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Book Review: Into The Water by Paula Hawkins

INTO THE WATER By Paula Hawkins

Publisher: Riverhead Books

Release Date: May 2, 2017

Sold by: Penguin Group (USA) LLC

Genre: Psychological Mystery – Thriller – Suspense

A single mother turns up dead at the bottom of the river that runs through town. Earlier in the summer, a vulnerable teenage girl met the same fate. They are not the first women lost to these dark waters, but their deaths disturb the river and its history, dredging up secrets long submerged. Left behind is a lonely fifteen-year-old girl. Parentless and friendless, she now finds herself in the care of her mother’s sister, a fearful stranger who has been dragged back to the place she deliberately ran from—a place to which she vowed she’d never return. With the same propulsive writing and acute understanding of human instincts that captivated millions of readers around the world in her explosive debut thriller, The Girl on the Train , Paula Hawkins delivers an urgent, twisting, deeply satisfying read that hinges on the deceptiveness of emotion and memory, as well as the devastating ways that the past can reach a long arm into the present. Beware a calm surface—you never know what lies beneath.

By John W Kurtze

Paula Hawkins is still writing like Alfred Hitchcock in her new book INTO THE WATER. Hawkins’ storyline grabs her readers’ attention describing the history of a woman drowning in a body of water known as “The Drowning Pool.” The author tells her psychological thriller by sharing the thoughts and actions of the residents of Beckford, England. Using a concept of transitioning between each character thoughts and actions, Hawkins’ readers follow the characters past and current thoughts throughout the storyline. The author skillfully gives each dead woman a voice by changing the font face and placing “The Drowning Pool,” at the top of the page. Hawkins identifies each woman’s name and the date of the thought of each deceased character

Readers will find there are multiple characters in Hawkins’ storyline. They hear from several residents, police, and relatives of the two most current women who have died in the pool.

The storyline momentum moves at steady pace giving readers time to consider what each character is saying or what they are doing and how it fits into the plot. Hawkins strives to involve her readers in each characters’ feelings and thoughts.

After the death of Nel Abbott, details of her writing project surface. Hawkins shares the backstory of Nel as an author/artist, and her book project is focusing on the drowning victims at the “Drowning Pool” giving readers an insight to what she has found. The author uses interesting methods to give readers different perspectives as they read each characters’ point of view. Hawkins hints where the story is going, also true to Hitchcock’s style, she develops events that might not be what they seem. INTO THE WATER, is a story with an ending that is a mystery. Hawkins writes a thought provoking story that is a must read and earns a five-star ranking.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Paula Hawkins worked as a journalist for fifteen years before turning her hand to fiction. Born and brought up in Zimbabwe, Paula moved to London in 1989 and has lived there ever since. Her first thriller, The Girl on the Train, has been published in over forty languages, has been a No.1 bestseller around the world and is now a major motion picture starring Emily Blunt. Into the Water is her second thriller.

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Book Review: Into The Water by Paula Hawkins

I felt that way about Girl on a Train; it was going nowhere slowly. I got so frustrated with the repetitive pace of that novel that I haven't been sucked into the publishing frenzy around Into The Water and won't be buying it. I'm just sorry I didn't use the same criteria for Fiona Burton's The Child. Her previous novel The Widow was only alright so I should have suspected her second attempt would be worse.

Oh, that is good to know. I was wondering about Fiona Burton's books. I've been wanting to give her a try.

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Into the Water by Paula Hawkins- ABR Book Award

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

GOODREADS CHOICE AWARD WINNER FOR MYSTERY/THRILLER

An addictive new novel of psychological suspense from the author of #1 New York Times bestseller and global phenomenon The Girl on the Train. Give a page-turning gift this holiday season.

“Hawkins is at the forefront of a group of female authors—think Gillian Flynn and Megan Abbott—who have reinvigorated the literary suspense novel by tapping a rich vein of psychological menace and social unease… there’s a certain solace to a dark escape, in the promise of submerged truths coming to light.” Vogue

Left behind is a lonely fifteen-year-old girl. Parentless and friendless, she now finds herself in the care of her mother’s sister , a fearful stranger who has been dragged back to the place she deliberately ran from—a place to which she vowed she’d never return.

With the same propulsive writing and acute understanding of human instincts that captivated millions of readers around the world in her explosive debut thriller, The Girl on the Train , Paula Hawkins delivers an urgent, twisting, deeply satisfying read that hinges on the deceptiveness of emotion and memory, as well as the devastating ways that the past can reach a long arm into the present.

The character development is top notch with interesting and in depth personalities. The descriptive writing had me on the scene watching on as the story unfolded. This is a book that every psychological suspense lover needs to read.’

Beware a calm surface—you never know what lies beneath. Into the Water by Paula Hawkins comes highly recommended by Artisan Book Reviews

Purchase Into the Water by Paula by Hawkins Today!

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Paula Hawkins

#1 New York Times Bestselling Author

Into the Water

ORDER CANADA

The problematic that this book touches on is much broader than it might seem, in the book you can also learn about the difficulties of treating erectile dysfunction .

BY PAULA HAWKINS

Reading Guide International Editions

Left behind is a lonely fifteen-year-old girl. Parentless and friendless, she now finds herself in the care of her mother’s sister, a fearful stranger who has been dragged back to the place she deliberately ran from—a place to which she vowed she’d never return.

Beware a calm surface—you never know what lies beneath.

“A captivating contemporary whodunit… suspense churns and the plot keeps you guessing.” —People Magazine

“Highly suspenseful… all these intrigues are teased out with impressive skill by Ms. Hawkins, who tells a complex narrative… in a chronicle whose final pages yield startling revelations.” — The Wall Street Journal

“[A] succulent new mystery… Hawkins, influenced by Hitchcock, has a cinematic eye and an ear for eerie, evocative language… So do dive in. The payoff is a socko ending. And a noirish beach read that might make you think twice about dipping a toe in those dark, chilly waters.” — USA Today

“Addicting… this novel has a little something for anyone looking for their next binge-read.” — Marie Claire

“Thrilling… we [are] kept guessing until the sobering conclusion.” — O Magazine

“Mother’s Day is coming up. This one’s perfect for the mom who always has shelf space for thrillers.” —theSkimm “Hawkins is at the forefront of a group of female authors – think Gillian Flynn and Megan Abbott – who have reinvigorated the literary suspense novel by tapping a rich vein of psychological menace and social unease… there’s a certain solace to a dark escape, in the promise of submerged truths coming to light.” — Vogue

“A unputdownable, smart, thoughtful thriller.” —PopSugar “An intriguing pop-feminist tale of small-town hypocrisy, sexual politics, and wrongs that won’t rinse clean.” —Entertainment Weekly

“Contains just as many hair-raising plot twists as [ The Girl on the Train ]. This time, Hawkins’s absorbing and chilling cast of mothers, daughters, and sisters grapples with the implications of memory, exploring what happens when our conflicting recollections of personal histories collide to destroy the present.” —Harper’s Bazaar

“Hawkins weaves another wonderfully twisted mystery.” — Coastal Living

“Readers will be locked in a guessing game until the unnerving conclusion… It’ll give you the most thrills and chills.” —Redbook

“Page-turner… a thriller that intersects complicated cultural narratives of adolescent sexuality, the often fraught relationships between daughters, mothers and sisters, and the relationship between ‘good men’ and ‘troublesome women.’” —Jezebel

“Hawkins has a real gift for exploring the manner in which we constantly turn things over in our minds, crafting inner monologues both rich and relatable… a lively, compelling, and surprisingly empathetic and humane page-turner.” —The A.V. Club

“Sometimes what we really need is a good thriller. And Paula Hawkins knows how to captivate readers with an enthralling and suspenseful mystery. Following her psychological thriller, The Girl on the Train , Paula Hawkins is at it again with Into the Water .” –Mic

“A page-turning thriller… Will haunt you long after this book is over.” —Bustle

“I couldn’t resist Hawkins’ anxiously awaited second novel … scary and addictive.” —Cup of Jo

“Hawkins constructs a bracing, knotty ride in which the ghosts of the past come back to haunt those living in the present.” – W Magazine

“Hawkins keeps you guessing until the final page.” —Real Simple

“Arresting… Hawkins is an ambitious writer, inclining to the literary end of the spectrum.” —Financial Times

“ Into the Water ” captures all the suspense and terrifying emotions of [The Girl on the Train], but it beams with a maturity in writing and in storytelling that will draw her fans right back over the edge… the novel also flows with an instinctual understanding of relationships, young love, devoted friendships and dedication to duty, familial faults and small-town paranoia.” —Minneapolis Star-Tribune

“When it comes to tension you could cut with a knife, no one does it better than Hawkins.” — New York Post

“An elegantly written tale that grips readers like a mighty current, guiding and taking them downriver toward the inevitable rocky ending and breathtaking plot twist in the novel’s final pages.” — Deseret News

“Hawkins is a master of waging emotional warfare among her characters against a backdrop of murder. Into the Water is one to read with the lights on.” — SF Weekly “Hawkins returns to the rotating-narration style of her breakout debut, giving voice to an even broader cast this time… Order by the ton.” — Booklist (starred review)

“Twisty and compulsive… Hawkins skillfully delves into the psyche of each character, extracting their feelings, fears and fallacies, slowly ramping up the psychological suspense as she goes.” — BookPage “The payoff packs a satisfying punch.” — Publishers Weekly

Samsara Parchment

Book review: into the water by paula hawkins.

Please be forewarned, the following review does contain spoilers. Please also be aware that this novel and this review mention several subjects which may be triggering to many readers, including, but not limited to, suicide and sexual assault.

Much like her previous novel, The Girl on the Train , Paula Hawkins’s new novel, Into the Water, made waves with its release on May 2 nd of this year. Coming off the success of The Girl on the Train and its movie adaptation starring Emily Blunt, as you can imagine, the hype surrounding Into the Water was real. For weeks leading up to its release and then immediately following, I felt like I couldn’t open Instagram or Twitter without seeing that watery blue cover staring back at me. I eventually gave into the hype because I am a mere, weak mortal and purchased Hawkins’s new novel to give it a read.

Into the Water is a mystery/thriller/psychological suspense novel about the events following the death of Danielle “Nel” Abbott, whose body is found in a river, in an area aptly named the “Drowning Pool”, which only brought up thoughts of the band every time I read it.

Nel’s death—and the fact that it happened in the river—is significant for a number of reasons, but one of the biggest reasons is that a young teenage girl who was friends with Nel’s daughter actually died in the same river only months ago. Before the deaths of Nel and Katie, apparently this particular “Drowning Pool” area of the river was the site of the death of several women in the town’s history, and Nel had been working on a book about these women, their untimely deaths, and their relation to the water. Part of the mystery revolves around the question of whether or not Nel’s delving into the town’s past could be related to her death, as well as whether or not she took her own life versus becoming the victim of a violent crime. But in addition to the mystery of Nel’s death, the book also delves into the mystery of Katie’s death, so if you like mystery, there is a whole hell of a lot of it happening in this novel.

One of the first things I like to take a look at when reviewing or assessing a book is the point of view, as the point of view can have such a major impact on the way the story is told. But in this case, I’m going to need you to hold on tight, because the discussion of points of view in Into the Water is not only a wild ride, it’s also one of my biggest criticisms—if not the biggest criticism—of the book.

Let me be clear about something before I get into my breakdown of this whole point of view situation: I do like books with more than one point of view. Love them. When done well, I think having a story told from multiple points of view can be dynamic, enriching, and enlightening to a story. So this is not coming from the perspective of someone who believes that books should only have one point of view. Not at all.

But there is such a thing as taking it too far, and I think Into the Water did just that.

This story is told from no less than eleven points of view. Yes, you read that right. There are almost a dozen points of view represented in this book.

We get this story from the point of view of Jules (adamant that it is Jules, not Julia) Abbott, who is the estranged sister of the Drowning Pool’s most recent victim, as well as the point of view of Lena Abbott, who is the daughter of Nel Abbott, and the best friend of Katie (the Drowning Pool’s other most recent victim). At this point, with Jules’s point of view and Lena’s contributions to the story, I was totally on board. It makes perfect sense that we would get to unravel this mystery through the eyes of a sister and a daughter.

Then we have the points of view of two police detectives who are investigating Nel Abbott’s death: Sean Townsend and Erin Morgan.

Okay, that’s pretty sensible, too. It is, after all, a mystery, so it’s perfectly reasonable that we get the POVs of some of the people who are looking into the mystery from a professional standpoint. Got it. Still totally on board.

But in addition to Jules, Lena, Sean, and Erin, we also have the point of view of Louise Whittaker, the mother of Katie, who you may recall was Lena’s best friend, as well as Josh Whittaker, brother of Katie and daughter of Louise. Then we have chapters from the POV of Nickie Sage, who is pretty clearly set up as the “Resident Weird Lady” of the town: an old woman with a penchant for all black outfits who claims she can communicate with the dead, and that she often hears the voices of the women who died in the Drowning Pool telling her their stories. Incidentally, Nickie is also the sister of a police detective who was on the force back when Sean Townsend’s mother died in the Drowning Pool. Speaking of Sean Townsend, his family members get a say in the story, too: Patrick Townsend, former police chief and Sean Townsend’s father, has chapters from his POV, as well as Helen Townsend, Sean Townsend’s wife.

But we’re not done yet. We also get chapters from the point of view of Mark Henderson, a teacher at the local school (so random, right? We’ll come back to that). And finally, we have chapters that are sort of from Nel Abbott’s POV, but not really, because they are actually chapters from her book that she was writing about all the women who have died in the Drowning Pool, so while these chapters are written in the third person as if they were written by Nel, they are specifically about Libby, Lauren, and Katie (yes, Katie Whittaker).

If looking at all these points of view has already given you a headache, darling, you are not alone.

You don’t need to be Detective Townsend or Detective Morgan to figure out what I think about all these POVs. If my tone hasn’t made it abundantly clear yet, I thought there were way too many . Having this many points of view, for me, really mucked up the story and there was just way too much going on. The problem isn’t that it was confusing or that it was hard to keep track of who was speaking—Hawkins made that very clear and did a fairly good job differentiating between the different characters’ voices and what was going on in their lives. The problem was just that there were so many different points of view happening, I found it way too difficult to actually get invested in any of them. The chapters were extremely short, so by the time we got involved in a person’s thoughts and ideas, we were already switching to another, and if you’re anything like me, wondering why this person was a part of the story at all. The overwhelming number of POVs shared here really detracted from the potential impact of the story, as well as detracting from the mystery itself. It’s the equivalent of surrounding a house with eight stationary video cameras as well as circling the same house with four cameras attached to drones: we now know exactly what the house looks like, and there’s absolutely nothing left to the imagination.

If this were a card game, I would say that Hawkins showed her hand way too early—like all of her hand. The entire thing. Just slapped it on the table for anyone and everyone to see.

For example, let’s take a moment to look at the POV of Mark Henderson, the teacher from the high school. As previously mentioned, that one came out of nowhere, right? When you’re going through the many, many POVs in this book, all of them are told in the voices of either someone who has lost a loved one to the Drowning Pool (Jules, Lena, Sean, Patrick, Louise, Josh) or someone who is investigating the case (Sean, Erin). Our only exceptions to this are as follows: Nickie Sage, who is connected to the Drowning Pool because she claims to speak to the dead who lost their lives there; Helen Townsend, whose husband lost his mother to the Drowning Pool and whose father-in-law lost his wife; Nel Abbott’s writings about women who lost their own lives to the Drowning Pool; and Mark Henderson, who…wait, what did Mark Henderson do? How is he a part of this?

One might argue that the inclusion of Mark Henderson’s point of view is part of the mystery and that it, in fact, adds to the suspense, but for me, I felt quite the opposite. If Henderson hadn’t lost a relative to the waters and wasn’t a cop investigating the case, then the only other option is that he was up to something shady related to one of the drowning victims. Maybe it’s just me. Maybe I was jumping to conclusions.

But it seemed like the only logical reason to have him in the book at all, and lo and behold, I was a hundred percent right. (For those of you who don’t plan on reading it, while he didn’t murder Nel or Katie, he was having an affair with fifteen-year-old Katie, who subsequently killed herself in the Drowning Pool when she believed their affair would be exposed and Henderson would essentially be crucified as a result.)

So, aside from Henderson’s shady interactions, I felt the rest of the mystery was pretty easy to piece together as the story went on, as well, which can either be a good thing or a bad thing. I know some readers love solving the mystery along with the characters and love to be the one saying, “It was Colonel Mustard in the library with the candlestick, you dummy!” while the characters languish in confusion for 85% of the book. But for other readers, figuring it out too far ahead of time can make the rest of the book too boring, as we hate being the ones yelling, “It was Colonel Mustard in the–”…well, you get the point. And while I didn’t necessarily predict the confession from the person who ended up confessing (again, spoiler alert, Patrick Townsend), I knew right away that Nel’s death was not a suicide and once it became obvious that she was involved with Sean Townsend, I figured it had something to do with that affair. And to be honest, it became pretty obvious that she was involved with Sean Townsend in what I think was only the second chapter from Lena Abbott’s point of view when she points out that it’s strange to have to call him “Detective Townsend” rather than Sean, tipping us off right away to the fact that the two have at least some level of relationship outside of this investigation.

All that being said, by no means did I dislike everything about this book, and I thought there were some things Paula Hawkins did very, very well. She definitely did weave a very tangled web with her mysteries, creating several layers of scandal rather than one straightforward mystery, which I commend her for. Some of the characters were very likable and relatable. Personally, I thought Nickie Sage was the best character in the whole book, and I loved that she was so unique and claimed to speak to the victims from beyond the grave, rather than having a more “traditional” or straightforward perspective. And of all the POVs, I really think Lena Abbott’s was the most well-written. It isn’t always easy to write from the perspective of a teenager (especially one going through what Lena is going through), but as far as I’m concerned, Hawkins nailed it. Lena read as a perfectly authentic confused, moody, overwhelmed teenage girl.

Although the ending of the book felt like it took forever because after the events came to a conclusion, we had to wrap up the story from ten points of view, I actually liked that some things were left unexplained. I liked that we never find out what happened to Mark Henderson, and we only get some hints from Lena, without her explicitly telling us anything. I liked that although Patrick Townsend confesses, we are still sort of up in the air about whether or not he was really the person who murdered Nel, especially since some of the details of his confession don’t match up with the evidence. I also like that we don’t know where Sean runs off to when he takes off, presumably in an attempt to flee his own demons. The subtle ambiguity woven into the ending of the novel was another one of the book’s strong points.

Finally, I think the best and most impactful scene in the entire book is near the end when Jules explains to Lena that when she was a teenager, she was sexually assaulted by Nel’s boyfriend, Robbie. Lena asks Jules why she never spoke up about it, why she didn’t press charges, and at this point Nel speaks the most honest, heartfelt words in the entire novel:

“I don’t think I saw it for what it was. What it really was. I thought rape was something a bad man did to you, a man who jumped out at you in an alleyway in the dead of night, a man who held a knife to your throat. I didn’t think boys did it. Not schoolboys like Robbie, not good-looking boys, the ones who go out with the prettiest girl in town. I didn’t think they did it to you in your own living room, I didn’t think they talked to you about it afterwards and asked you if you’d had a good time. I just thought I must have done something wrong, that I hadn’t made it clear enough that I didn’t want it.”

This confession was like a punch in the chest, and I think is so relatable for so many people today who may have had similar experiences. This felt more genuine than anything in the entire book—even the deaths, even the grieving—and I couldn’t help but think that if only the rest of the novel had delivered this level of insight and poignancy, I would have loved it so much more.

Have any of you read Into the Water ? What did you think of it? Did you like having eleven points of view to follow, or was it just too much? Let me know what you think in the comments! You know I’d love to talk. <3

3 thoughts on “Book Review: Into the Water by Paula Hawkins”

I honestly absolutely loved all of the different points of view. But, like you said, piecing together little hints from everyone’s stories, I easily predicted the ending. This was the only thing that bummed me out. Although I am dying to know what REALLY happened to Mark Henderson. Maybe he will get his own novel! Ya!

Thanks for your comment, Stacey! Glad you enjoyed the book. While I usually really enjoy books with multiple POVs, I just didn’t like how this one in particular was handled. It showed way too many cards and for me, felt more jumbled than organized. You’re right though that Mark Henderson’s storylines & motivations are somewhat intriguing. Thanks again for stopping by! 🙂

I really liked this mystery; it was hard to put down. However, I needed to refer to the list of characters in the front quite a bit. The reason I’m here is I was hoping to find out what happened to Mark Henderson. That remains unresolved for me and I really wanted to know.

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Into the Water: The addictive Sunday Times No. 1 bestseller

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Into the Water: The addictive Sunday Times No. 1 bestseller Kindle Edition

A gripping psychological thriller from the author of the global phenomenon The Girl on the Train __ 'Wondering if Into the Water could be as good as The Girl on the Train? It's better. A triumph.' Clare Mackintosh, bestselling author of I Let You Go 'A moody and chilling thriller that will have you madly turning the pages. A gripping, compulsive read!' Shari Lapena, bestselling author of The Couple Next Door 'A brilliantly plotted and fast-paced juggernaut of a read that hurtles to a heart-stopping conclusion.' Good Housekeeping ___ Just days before her sister plunged to her death, Jules ignored her call. Now Nel is dead. They say she jumped. And Jules must return to her sister's house to care for her daughter, and to face the mystery of Nel's death. But Jules is afraid. Of her long-buried memories, of the old Mill House, of this small town that is drowning in secrecy . . . And of knowing that Nel would never have jumped. ___ Readers are gripped by Into the Water ***** 'So dark, yet stylish and slick. Into the Water gripped me, twisted me and totally consumed me.' ***** 'So many twist and turns . . . keeps you wanting to read more and stay up all night.' ***** 'Filled with suspense and with characters I genuinely cared about, I was hooked by every page.'

Print length 450 pages
Language English
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Publisher Transworld Digital
Publication date May 2, 2017
File size 3211 KB
Page Flip Enabled
Word Wise Enabled
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ASIN ‏ : ‎ B01M5GAN0C
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Transworld Digital (May 2, 2017)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ May 2, 2017
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 3211 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 450 pages
#2,467 in Psychological Thrillers (Kindle Store)
#3,193 in Crime Thrillers (Kindle Store)
#4,331 in Psychological Thrillers (Books)

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About the author

Paula hawkins.

PAULA HAWKINS worked as a journalist for fifteen years before writing her first novel. Born and brought up in Zimbabwe, Paula moved to London in 1989. Her first thriller, The Girl on the Train, has sold more than 23 million copies worldwide. Published in over fifty languages, it has been a Number 1 bestseller around the world and was a box office hit film starring Emily Blunt.

Paula's thrillers, Into the Water and A Slow Fire Burning, were also instant Number 1 bestsellers.

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Customers say

Customers say they enjoy the reading experience and find the buildup great. They also find the writing style tiresome, slow, and difficult to keep everything straight. Readers describe the book as a thriller, but find it difficult to settle into. Opinions are mixed on readability, with some finding it good and intriguing, while others say it's confusing and difficult. Customers also disagree on the plot, with others finding it exciting and creepy, while still others say the actions don't match what they'd come to expect. They disagree on characters, with one finding them relatable and understandable, while another feels they're too many.

AI-generated from the text of customer reviews

Customers find the book enjoyable, remarkable, and fun. They also say the build up is great and the middle of the book is exciting.

"...This is absolutely one of the best books I read this year. It actually reminds me why I love Paula Hawkins’ books...." Read more

"...Girl on the Train, Paula Hawkins delivers an urgent, twisting, deeply satisfying read that hinges on the deceptiveness of emotion and memory, as..." Read more

"...I enjoyed the book a great deal , despite a few areas that didn’t quite work for me, but I’d still recommend it to others as a strong thriller and..." Read more

"... Fantastic job !" Read more

Customers are mixed about the plot. Some find it exciting, full of mystery, and haunting. They also say the themes tackled are ambitious and far-reaching. However, some find the plot predictable, boring, and disappointing. They feel the characters' actions don't quite match what they'd come to expect.

"...Not only were the scenes packed with suspense , but the suspense was building up through the whole plot keeping the reader wide-eyed...." Read more

"...With the same propulsive writing and acute understanding of human instincts that captivated millions of readers around the world in her explosive..." Read more

"...For 3 characters, I felt like the actions didn’t quite match what we’d come to expect from the personalities we’d gotten to know – and it wasn’t due..." Read more

"...Her endgame was intense and maybe a tad brilliant...." Read more

Customers are mixed about the readability. Some find the writing very good and intriguing, with clever and interesting twists and turns. They also say it's a page-turner, while others find it confusing, repetitive, and laborious.

"...tale with many red herrings, too many characters, and a lot of confusing elements ...." Read more

"...She is really one of the most talented writers .When it comes to Paula Hawkins’ books, it’s the ride you enjoy most...." Read more

"...I feel like there were a lot of questions not completely answered and lots of assumptions made...." Read more

"...Confusing, convoluted , and predictable, yes. Thrilling, no. I can't say I'd recommend this one." Read more

Customers are mixed about the characterization. Some find the characters relatable and understandable, while others say there are too many characters and a lot of names to remember.

"...] was a convoluted tale with many red herrings, too many characters , and a lot of confusing elements...." Read more

"...I told you that this story starts out very confusing with many characters ...." Read more

"...She has a unique style. To start with, she had a wide cast of characters , so many threads and multiple timelines...." Read more

"...It’s just too much and too many characters where I just kept getting lost...." Read more

Customers are mixed about the length of the book. Some find the chapters short and intense enough to keep them interested till the end, while others say it drags the first 150 pages and is long winded.

"...was way too hard to follow, especially given that many of the chapters were very short ...." Read more

"...In your new novel, I did like the short chapters and the different narrators for each chapter...." Read more

"...It didn't work. Even the dialogue was tiresome; protracted , banal and devoid of meaning or substance...." Read more

"...The chapters are short and jump from different characters perspectives and from past to present...." Read more

Customers have mixed opinions about the engagingness of the book. Some find it hard to put down and look forward to the next, while others say they couldn't put it down.

"...jumped right into it, and found it fascinatingly original and difficult to put down ...." Read more

" Couldn’t put down " Read more

" Hard to put down ! At first I had to pay attention to dates and people but once I figured that out I thought it great...." Read more

" difficult to put down " Read more

Customers find the book not very thrilling, painfully bad, and an excruciating waste of money. They also mention that the beginning is draggy and tough, and the book lacks the intensity of the author's debut book. Additionally, readers mention that it is heavy and emotional, and difficult to settle into.

"...It was not bad but also not super addicting . I feel like there were a lot of questions not completely answered and lots of assumptions made...." Read more

"...All in all, for a book marketed as a thriller, it wasn't very thrilling . Confusing, convoluted, and predictable, yes. Thrilling, no...." Read more

"...It is heavy and emotional . I lost my 18 year old son to suicide two years ago and it has ripped our family apart...." Read more

"...For me, this was confusing and a little exhausting at times ...." Read more

Customers find the writing style tiresome, with several points of view and jumping back and forth in time. They also say the book has multiple narrators and jumps around a lot, making it difficult to keep everything straight.

"...There were more than POVs throughout the book , and on top of trying to remember who was who and how they were all connected, there were chapters..." Read more

"... Holy narrators . I'm not even sure now, after finishing the book, that I know how many there were...." Read more

"...of the reader, but once you commit, Hawkins delivers, and the pages turn just as fast , and because the themes tackled are so ambitious, so far-..." Read more

"...points where my mind completely glazed over because the POV kept jumping back and forth . The plot was predictable...." Read more

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How Does a Single Water Droplet Connect People Across Centuries?

Elif Shafak’s new novel, “There Are Rivers in the Sky,” follows the same drop of water from the Tigris to the Thames, from antiquity to the 19th century to today.

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A color illustration of four sets of turquoise hands layered on top of one another, growing smaller as they get higher, the top pair cupping a large dark blue droplet of water. The hands are surrounded by a halo of pink.

By Stephen Markley

Stephen Markley is the author of the novels “Ohio” and “The Deluge.”

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THERE ARE RIVERS IN THE SKY , by Elif Shafak

However water first arrived on Earth — we still don’t really know — every drop in our bodies today is the original stuff. Water has seen it all: the rise and fall of every self-important species, every empire, every catastrophe, collapse and extinction. That water-drop perspective guides the premise of “There Are Rivers in the Sky,” the engaging and melancholy new novel by Elif Shafak in which a single water molecule falls upon characters spanning centuries.

The novel journeys between the two rivers, the Tigris and the Thames, from Mesopotamia to London and back again, beginning with the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal. The learned tyrant murders, tortures and wages endless war all while gripping the tablet of his favorite poem, “The Epic of Gilgamesh.” This story of humanity’s first great antihero will echo across millenniums, even as Ashurbanipal’s empire disintegrates. The storm comes and the flood begins, “for, unlike humans, water has no regard for social status or royal titles.”

Ashurbanipal’s vignette only sets the table, however, for the three main protagonists. The first is Arthur Smyth, a polymath born into London’s worst slums at their industrially polluted zenith in the 1840s. Arthur suffers from hyperthymesia, the rare ability to remember staggering amounts of one’s life in vivid, suffocating detail. He follows an unlikely path from the city’s “sewers and slums” to working in the British Museum where by chance he Good-Will-Huntings the cuneiform tablets of the Assyrian Empire. He becomes obsessed with ancient Nineveh and makes it his life’s work to unearth the secrets of this long-gone civilization.

Jumping from 19th-century London to Turkey in 2014, we find Narin, a young Yazidi girl who is slowly going deaf. She lives with her family in Hasankeyf, where a massive dam is about to block the Tigris and submerge the ancient town and its archaeological history. With this stretch of the Tigris endangered, Narin’s grandmother decides to take her to Iraq for her baptism just as the first murmurs of the terrorist group ISIS echo across the region.

Finally, Dr. Zaleekhah Clarke is a hydrologist in 2018 who’s going through a divorce, halfheartedly suicidal and vexed by a relationship with her more traditional uncle, who raised her after the death of her parents. Zaleekhah gives us a full-spectrum overview of humanity’s troubled relationship to water: “Even after all these years of studying it, water never ceases to surprise her, astonishingly resilient but also acutely vulnerable — a drying, dying force.”

There is many a meditation on water throughout the novel, but Zaleekhah’s chapters anchor the author’s preoccupation as we follow the character down fascinating rabbit holes like the lost rivers of London — diverted, destroyed or straight-jacketed in concrete. Some of the novel’s best passages explores this curiosity about the materiality of water and what our species has done with it.

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Book Review: Technology and chaotic government programs doom family farms in ‘Land Rich Cash Poor’

The Associated Press

August 27, 2024, 9:58 AM

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Brian Reisinger’s “Land Rich Cash Poor” emerges as an anthem to the family farm in America, romanticized despite the never-ending work even in good times, which have been sparse in the last century.

The book follows a procession of efforts by other authors laboring to explain America’s farm troubles but few are as lyrically written or as deeply and personally detailed.

Reisinger was destined to become a fourth-generation farmer until he went off to college and decided his calling lay beyond the cows and fields of his family’s Wisconsin farm.

Increasingly since the first machines started to revolutionize agriculture, farmers have been driven to expand or sell, find niche products for their output, get second jobs in town or diversify their farm. An Irvine, California, farmer, for example, built an event center on his property and now hosts weddings and other gatherings. Absent the diversified income, the farmer would have been land rich but cash poor.

The book is well sourced and bogs down only in the early going when Reisinger laments the loss of “our way of life” at least five times.

But that’s a small nick on an otherwise polished takeout on what ails American farming outside the view of most consumers who only see the end result of farmers’ toil: Full grocery shelves. And despite the inflationary pressures in recent years, the book notes that Americans generally paid just 10% of their income for food in 2020, down from 40% in 1910.

The book also links the demise of the family farm in America with the rural-urban rift in America; small towns that supported groups of family farms often have shrunken as land-rich farmers sold out to escape becoming cash poor.

Here are some of the steps Reisinger prescribes to pull American farming out of its cycle of perpetual crises.

• Start a research and development revolution

• Remake government policy around competition

• Reorganize farms around new market opportunities

• Revitalize rural communities

Reisinger is disciplined in veering into any political discussion of agriculture but politics clearly has been damaging to the American farmer. For example, the Nixon administration’s negotiation that opened the Soviet Union to American grain sales turned into another punishment for farmers when President Jimmy Carter embargoed sales to the Soviet Union after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan.

Less compelling is Reisinger’s argument that the loss of family farms is destroying our capacity to feed ourselves; modern American corporate agriculture lacks the image of the happy family farm but big-company farms clearly produce food in great quantities.

Still, the farm challenges that Reisinger chronicles remain serious and worthy of our elected officials’ attention. Don’t expect much though this coming election, given the volume of other issues we face.

Reisinger doesn’t mention it, but consider the potential for farm upheaval if Donald Trump should be elected and follow his stated plan to deport millions of improperly documented immigrants, which will leave American farmers lacking enough labor to harvest their crops.

That will leave even more farmers land rich but cash poor.

AP book reviews: https://apnews.com/hub/book-reviews

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Into the depths: New book explores water symbolism in German literature

Alexander sorenson explores the role of the environment in 19th-century cultural consciousness.

Binghamton University Lecturer of German and Comparative Literature Alexander Sorenson

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Everyone drowns in German Realist literature.

All right, maybe not everyone . But in text after text, characters slip under the water — claimed by river, flood or sea — never to be seen again. All that drowning must symbolize something, but what?

Binghamton University Lecturer of German and Comparative Literature Alexander Sorenson pieces together the puzzle of meaning in his new book, The Waiting Water: Order, Sacrifice, and Submergence in German Realism (Cornell University Press) .

When he began to read German literature as an undergraduate, Sorenson was struck by how often characters drowned. No one seemed to know why, and his professor encouraged Sorenson to research the topic. His junior-year term paper eventually sparked a doctoral dissertation, which gave rise to the book.

“It’s more than just a motif that pops up here and there; it’s not just a flourish,” he explained. “I suspected that there has to be something central about it.”

His analysis focuses on 19th-century texts by Adalbert Stifter, Gottfried Keller, Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, and Theodor Storm, along with material from earlier and later epochs. What emerged during his research was the intersection of literature with the natural environment and the role the environment plays in social consciousness.

“It’s shocking how prevalent it is and how unrestricted water is as a symbolic resource,” Sorenson said. “It’s self-consciously experimental.”

Law and sacrifice

During the 19th century, German-speaking lands were undergoing industrialization — which, along with realistic literature itself, came years after similar developments in England and France.

Compared with much English and French realism, which often focuses on urban life, the natural environment plays a distinct role in German Realist literature—not just as a setting but as a character in its own right. Typical realist concerns with mass society and industrialism are there, but they play out in different ways, Sorenson said.

“There’s definitely a relationship with the onset of industrialized capitalism,” he said. “The environmental impacts weren’t immediately obvious in the same way as England, where the countryside had been transformed from the 18th century onward.”

Drowning occurs in English—and French-language literature as well, but it often derives from a cultural fascination with the figure of Ophelia from Shakespeare’s Hamlet .

“While Ophelia was present and played a role in the later part of the 1800s and especially in the early 1900s, it was more complicated than that,” he said of the German motif overall. “In the German literary tradition, and especially realism, one way to put it is that everybody drowns. You have people of all ages, men and women, non-human creatures. It’s really all over the place.”

However, young people seem particularly susceptible to this fate in German literature; one of the earliest texts Sorenson explores is a novel by Goethe that features the death of a child. Nor is feminine melancholy — as seen with the Ophelia trope — the sole driver behind German literary drownings.

Instead, the motif revolves around dual concepts of order and sacrifice, Sorenson argues.

Sacrifice is traditionally viewed as a violent or destructive process used to appease a higher power and atone for individual or collective guilt. The ultimate goal is to reestablish a balance between the earthly world and the divine, he said. That’s not how the theme played out in the texts, however.

“In addition to the expansion of the sociocultural and gender dynamics of the drowning motif, what surprised me was the way that sacrifice operated, and what it actually meant,” he said. “What I ended up arguing in the book was that in German Realism, sacrifice is more of an ethical process; it deals with ethical and moral dilemmas of decision and choice, specifically with relinquishing or surrendering one thing for the sake of something else.

Often, it’s the self, offered up for the sake of someone else or for a specific social good (and sometimes vice versa), a concept tightly interwoven with questions of lawfulness.

In these narratives, that process “consistently plays out ultimately near or in water. It surprises you as a reader and forces you to rethink what law and sacrifice actually mean and what they look like,” he said.

These events occur almost invariably on the edges of communities, such as rivers that separate a town from the broader landscape; to become submerged is to disappear into the periphery of society.

In his current project, Sorenson continues to focus on nature in 19th-century poetry, theology and philosophy, particularly the natural world as a sacramental space. There, nature is not regarded as divine, nor as a mechanistic set of forces and processes devoid of spirit, a view that became common with the scientific revolution.

“There’s this fleeting middle space where nature becomes a point or a zone of encounter between the material and the mechanistic, the inanimate and the sacred,” he explained. “Nature is the place where those two things come into contact with each other.”

It’s a surprisingly modern message, one that feels deeply relevant to today’s environmental movement, he said.

“I’m doing the same literary, interpretive work, but trying to put that in the service of practical ways to think about the natural world now and translating that into behavior, habits and modes of engagement,” he said.

Michelle Obama blasts Trump at DNC, references Trump's 'Black jobs' comment

Former First Lady Michelle Obama dug into former President Donald Trump during her speech on the second day of the 2024 Democratic National Convention .

She called out his racist attacks against both former President Barack Obama and Vice President Kamala Harris. Throughout Barack Obama's presidency, Trump repeatedly and publicly doubted Obama’s US citizenship and, recently, questioned Harris’ racial identity

“For years, Donald Trump did everything in his power to try to make people fear us,” Obama said. “See, his limited, narrow view of the world made him feel threatened by the existence of two hard-working, highly educated, successful people who happen to be Black.”

“I want to know — I want to know — who’s going to tell him, who’s going to tell him, that the job he is currently seeking might just be one of those Black jobs?” she added, referring to Trump’s recent statements that immigrants are taking “Black jobs .” .

“It’s his same old con. His same old con. Doubling down on ugly, misogynistic, racist lies as a substitute for real ideas and solutions that will actually make people’s lives better,” she said.

Obama also referred to policies promoted by the former president, like limiting abortion and banning books, calling them “small.”

“Going small is the opposite of what we teach our kids. Going small is petty. It’s unhealthy. And quite frankly, it’s unpresidential,” she said. “So, why would any of us accept this from anyone seeking our highest office?”

More: Fashion at the DNC: After speech, Michelle Obama's outfit has internet buzzing

Obama, Pritzker, other DNC speakers blast Trump too

Obama’s speech was just one of many that blasted the former president Tuesday. Her husband ridiculed Trump for his “childish nicknames,” “crazy conspiracy theories,” and “weird obsession with crowd sizes.”

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker , a billionaire, said that Trump is only rich in “stupidity.” And Illinois Sen. Tammy Duckworth criticized what she called “Trump’s anti-woman crusade.”

What's true and what's false? Sign up for USA TODAY's Checking the Facts newsletter.

Who is speaking at the DNC Wednesday?

The four-day long convention continues today, with featured speakers including former President Bill Clinton, former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz will close out the evening in accepting the Democratic vice presidential nomination.

IMAGES

Book Review: Into The Water by Paula Hawkins
Into the Water by Paula Hawkins
Book Review
Book Review: Into the Water by Paula Hawkins
Review: Into The Water by Paula Hawkins
Book Review: Into the Water by Paula Hawkins

COMMENTS

Into the Water by Paula Hawkins
Paula Hawkins. The author of the #1 New York Times bestseller and global phenomenon The Girl on the Train returns with Into the Water, her addictive new novel of psychological suspense. A single mother turns up dead at the bottom of the river that runs through town. Earlier in the summer, a vulnerable teenage girl met the same fate.
Review: Into the Water by Paula Hawkins
Book Review (No Spoilers) So, Into The Water is primarily about the investigation into a death that occurs at the "Drowning Pool", a part of a river that lies underneath a cliff where many deaths have occurred over the years. But the Drowning Pool's storied history quickly comes into play, and the circumstances surrounding a number of ...
Paula Hawkins's 'Into the Water' Dives Into Murky Skulduggery
INTO THE WATER By Paula Hawkins 386 pages. Riverhead Books. $28. ... poets, critics and other book lovers — with a little help from the staff of The New York Times Book Review.
Into the Water by Paula Hawkins: EW Review
A review of the latest book from the 'Girl on the Train' author ... Into the Water review: ... Water pours on no less than 14 narrators, all residents of an otherwise bucolic village in Northern ...
Book Review: Into the Water by Paula Hawkins
Into the Water takes place in a small, eerie little town which is home to a creepy river, a section of it nicknamed "the drowning pool". Many women have died mysteriously there, but they have been deemed 'suicides' by law enforcement both past and present. We land here during present day, where the body of a local artist, Nel has been ...
Amazon.com: Customer reviews: Into the Water: A Novel
INTO THE WATER is a totally different book than Hawkins' first. It is strong enough to stand on its own merits. I discovered through an online interview - the author was working on this idea before The Girl on the Train and continued to work on it even during the first book promotion.
Dive in to Paula Hawkins' scary 'Into the Water'
Pay attention, though. The various plot currents eventually converge, and when they do Into the Water takes off with a rush. (Yes, Water gushes with liquid imagery.) The novel begins with Jules ...
INTO THE WATER
An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud. Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away. 51.
Into the Water by Paula Hawkins: Book Review
Summary: Into the Water by Paula Hawkins. Into the Water by Paula Hawkins is a good book as long as you don't compare it to Girl on the Train. It has a lot of depth, character twists that are painful rather than shocking. If you're like me, you'll need to be a certain kind of mood to enjoy a book like this. However, if you give it a ...
Into the Water
Into the Water (2017) is a thriller novel by British author Paula Hawkins. [1] ... The review aggregator website Book Marks reported that 63% of critics "panned" the book, whilst 19% and 6% of the critics expressed "mixed" or "positive" impressions, respectively. Another 13% of the critics gave the book a "rave" review, based on a sample of 16 ...
Into the Water: A Novel: Hawkins, Paula: 9780735211209: Amazon.com: Books
Into the Water is one to read with the lights on."— SF Weekly "Hawkins returns to the rotating-narration style of her breakout debut, giving voice to an even broader cast this time… Order by the ton." — Booklist (starred review) "Twisty and compulsive… Hawkins skillfully delves into the psyche of each character, extracting their ...
Into the Water, review
There's no doubt that Into the Water will sell a lot of copies. Like Paula Hawkins' 2015 hit The Girl On the Train, this, her second thriller, is one that will appear on those "beach reads ...
Book Marks reviews of Into the Water by Paula Hawkins
Into the Water captures all the suspense and terrifying emotions of the first, but it beams with a maturity in writing and in storytelling that will draw her fans right back over the edge ... Hawkins' tale is told through so many sets of eyes that it's sometimes hard to keep the playlist straight ... But the novel also flows with an instinctual understanding of relationships, young love ...
Summary and reviews of Into the Water by Paula Hawkins
Book Summary. An addictive new novel of psychological suspense from the author of #1 New York Times bestseller and global phenomenon The Girl on the Train. "Hawkins is at the forefront of a group of female authors—think Gillian Flynn and Megan Abbott—who have reinvigorated the literary suspense novel by tapping a rich vein of psychological ...
Book Review: Into The Water by Paula Hawkins
REVIEW. By John W Kurtze. Paula Hawkins is still writing like Alfred Hitchcock in her new book INTO THE WATER. Hawkins' storyline grabs her readers' attention describing the history of a woman drowning in a body of water known as "The Drowning Pool.". The author tells her psychological thriller by sharing the thoughts and actions of the ...
Book review: Paula Hawkins's *Into the Water*
Katie and Lena's high school teacher Mark Henderson knew about bad blood between Nel and Louise. Since Nel's death, a burden has been lifted from Mark, though the river--once a source of pleasure for him--has become a place of horror. Nel's uncompleted book about the Drowning Pool might explains Lena's aberrant behavior, and Jules ...
Book Review: Into The Water by Paula Hawkins
When I heard that Paula Hawkins was coming out with another book called Into the Water, I was super excited.I really enjoyed The Girl on the Train so I expected her second novel to be even better. I deliberately stayed away from reviews of Into the Water because I didn't want my mind colored by anyone else's thoughts of the book. However, with that being said, I kept procrastinating on either ...
Book Review: INTO THE WATER by Paula Hawkins
INTO THE WATER by Paula Hawkins. Riverhead; 5/2/17. CBTB Rating: 2.5/5. The Verdict: not for crime readers - better as literary or women's fiction. I've been sitting on this review for a little while now, not wanting to admit that a book as highly anticipated as INTO THE WATER just didn't work for me. But it's just the truth: INTO THE WATER ...
Into the Water by Paula Hawkins- ABR Book Award
Into The Water by Paula Hawkins Buy on Amazon. Into the Water by Paula Hawkins #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER GOODREADS CHOICE AWARD WINNER FOR MYSTERY/THRILLER. An addictive new novel of psychological suspense from the author of #1 New York Times bestseller and global phenomenon The Girl on the Train. Give a page-turning gift this holiday season. ...
Into the Water review : Reviewed: Into the Water by Paula Hawkins
Devout fans of the compulsive hit The Girl on the Train may be surprised by Paula Hawkins' second novel, Into the Water, says Céire Duggan
Into the Water
A single mother turns up dead at the bottom of the river that runs through town. Earlier in the summer, a vulnerable teenage girl met the same fate. They are not the first women lost to these dark waters, but their deaths disturb the river and its history, dredging up secrets long submerged. Left behind is a lonely fifteen-year-old girl.
Book Review: Into the Water by Paula Hawkins
Please be forewarned, the following review does contain spoilers. Please also be aware that this novel and this review mention several subjects which may be triggering to many readers, including, but not limited to, suicide and sexual assault.. Much like her previous novel, The Girl on the Train, Paula Hawkins's new novel, Into the Water, made waves with its release on May 2 nd of this year.
Into the Water: The addictive Sunday Times No. 1 bestseller
Into the Water, her second stand-alone thriller, has also been a global No.1 bestseller, spending twenty weeks in the Sunday Times hardback fiction Top 10 bestseller list, and six weeks at No.1. Paula's latest thriller, A Slow Fire Burning, will be released on 31st August 2021.
Book Review: 'There Are Rivers in the Sky,' by Elif Shafak
100 Best Books of the 21st Century: As voted on by 503 novelists, nonfiction writers, poets, critics and other book lovers — with a little help from the staff of The New York Times Book Review.
Book Review: Technology and chaotic government programs doom ...
And despite the inflationary pressures in recent years, the book notes that Americans generally paid just 10% of their income for food in 2020, down from 40% in 1910.
Something in the Water (2024 film)
The film received mixed reviews upon its release. In a four-star review, Catherine Bray of The Guardian noted that "audiences hoping for lashings of graphic violence may be disappointed" but that there is "larky tension between likeable characters who find themselves plunged into a nightmare scenario." [6]Donald Clarke of The Irish Times gave the film a negative review, noting that "the ...
The Horn Book
Review of Deep Water. by Julie Hakim Azzam Aug 27, 2024 ... e-book ed. 9781665935081 $10.99. Open-water marathon swimming (any continuous swim over ten kilometers) is not for the faint of heart and is typically done with meticulous planning, careful consideration for the weather and water conditions, and a skilled kayaker and other safety ...
The Last Dream by Pedro Almodovar: 4-star review
I sometimes think of writers as film directors on smaller budgets. Their goal is much the same: to impart an image, a vision, to us. The vocations can even overlap: Pier Paolo Pasolini wrote ...
Into the depths: New book explores water symbolism in German literature
Into the depths: New book explores water symbolism in German literature Alexander Sorenson explores the role of the environment in 19th-century cultural consciousness Binghamton University Lecturer of German and Comparative Literature Alexander Sorenson Image Credit: Jonathan Cohen.
Michelle Obama's DNC speech blasts Trump: What did she say?
Former First Lady Michelle Obama dug into former President Donald Trump during her speech on the second day of the 2024 Democratic National Convention. She called out his racist attacks against ...

Into The Water

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Into the Water review: Paula Hawkins returns with another 'grey-toned' mystery

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