It’s party time. Your friends just came back from a trip to Melbourne, Australia. They’re gonna have a bunch of people over to see the photos and videos of their adventure. Everyone is encouraged to bring a dish. When you get there, you behold the golden glory that is a plate of chocolate chip cookies.

“Haha, alright.” You think to yourself like the shameless sweets guzzler you are.

One bite is all it takes for you to realise that uh, (what the heck?) it’s an oatmeal raisin cookie.

Has this ever happened to you? Yea, I thought so. Well imagine this:

What if every single dish everybody brought was something that looked delicious but was actually awful? A nightmare, innit? Well I’ve got news for you. The Girl on the Train is such a nightmare. This book has a whole cast of unlikable characters with not one decent person that you’d want to root for. Allow me to detail just why I hate them so much.

Rachel: The Oatmeal Raisin Cookie

Rachel is our protagonist. Sadly. Rachel is a heavy alcoholic who drinks from sunrise to sunset and is frequently blackout drunk, calling her ex, and throwing up in the flat she shares with a friend. Not only that, she doesn’t have a job and hasn’t told anybody this and subsequently has money problems.

“Funny how you glossed over the fact that she’s depressed since she can’t have a child and her husband cheated on her” I hear you muttering to yourself. Shut up, that’s not the point.

One of the biggest reasons I hated Rachel throughout this book is her lack of resolve to seek recourse for her problems. There’s a readily available AA meeting locally but she doesn’t go because she doesn’t want to run into anybody she’ll end up seeing while walking down the street. She goes to a cafe everyday to job search but she never actually puts in an application anywhere. Not only that but she has a flatmate, who is way too nice and forgiving for her own good, willing to help her through both of these problems.

You can argue that she’s a realistic portrayal of a flawed human being and you’d be right. Rachel is realistically a human that I would hate. Someone who doesn’t change no matter how much help you offer. There are no redeeming qualities that she is given throughout the story, making it difficult to root for her. This is not bad writing, this is a bad decision on Paula Hawkins’ part.

My final gripe with her character is that she still fawns over the man that cheated on her. Like, little to no animosity. If he wanted to get back with her she wouldn’t even hesitate to accept him. But enough about her, let’s talk about him.

Tom: The Tofu Bacon

Tom is Rachel’s ex-husband. He had an affair with another woman, divorced Rachel, and then had a family in the same house they used to live in. It’s quite a negative introduction. Despite this fact, almost every scene he is in portrays him as this kind, sensible, benevolent, and forgiving person. Nothing Tom does in the present upsets me, instead it’s this disingenuous way that he presents himself that really just makes me upset in every scene he’s in. He has no right behaving the way he does considering his recent history. You can’t tell the reader that Tom is the biggest scumbag in this story and expect them to accept his kind words as genuine.

“Clearly you’re missing the point. She did that ON PURPOSE. Didn’t you read the plot twist at the end?” You say to yourself, smh’ing your head.

Yea. This much is obvious. It’s because of this writing decision that the plot twist at the end isn’t a plot twist, it’s just what I expected him to behave like the whole story. I was honestly the least upset with Tom at the end of the book. And that brings me to my other issue.

Tom stopped being a human being at the end of the story. I didn’t hate Tom at this point much because I didn’t feel anything about him. He became a comic book villain instead of someone with realistic and understandable motivations. The ending really fell flat because of it. I didn’t see it coming because of how hard the book tried to make Tom seem nice and yet it was the least surprising thing to happen because he just seemed like he was a jerk in reality. It’s actually pretty outstanding that Hawkins achieved this.

Anna: The Almond Milk

Anna’s not a clown. She’s the entire circus. She is so extremely unlikable that I don’t even need to do a deconstruction on her character. She reveals everything wrong with herself in the very chapters that she narrates.

Anna speaks like a pretentious and entitled poet trying to use posh language for everything but ending up just sounding really, really annoying. And she will not shut up about her child for one moment. Everything has to come back to her beautiful blessed baby that everyone in the world is apparently envious of. Nobody cares but her, and she can’t (or won’t) realise this.

She also, much like almond milk, is absolutely disgusting. Anna legitimately sees nothing wrong with the affair she had and the fact that she’s a homewrecker. It’s almost as if she considers it her right to have done it. I can barely stand reading her chapters.

“I miss being a mistress.” She doesn’t even have class or an ounce of regret after the fact. She even goes on to say that she was able to cause them to have a divorce because she’s “irresistible” .

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Finally, she has a complete disregard for human life, which is her most disgusting trait. I didn’t think she could get worse but she truly has no soul. After finding out Megan turned up dead after being missing, she says,

“I’m glad she’s gone. Good riddance.”

I was fuming when I read this. Especially considering that Megan never slighted anybody or was mean to them. In fact, she babysat for Anna. And yet, just because Anna doesn’t like her, she thinks it’s a good thing that she was murdered.

Believe it or not, this attitude presents itself one more time. When Anna finds out Tom is a liar, manipulator, and murderer she doesn’t do anything. Even when he’s about to kill Rachel. Because this is what she always wanted. In fact, she not upset when she finds out all these things about Tom until he

c o m p a r e s   A n n a   t o    R a c h e l .

Being compared to someone she doesn’t respect is a worse crime than lying, cheating, manipulating, or killing to Anna because she has no soul and only has room for vanity in her smooth brain.

In the end, no consequences come to Anna. She actually ends up helping save the day. Anna is the biggest and most soulless piece of human rubbish in the book and yet she actually has the least number of bad things happen to her. And by that I mean almost nothing bad happens to her.

Bloody justice.

Leaving the Party Hungry

Yea, much like a party with only bad food available, this book leaves much to be desired. But at the very least I desired one main character that was a decent human being.

I had three stages of emotions when reading this: boredom, anger, and disappointment. If that’s the experience you want, I’m still not gonna recommend this book. I might burn it. I don’t know.