The Girl Books

The Girl Books

Since the great popularity of Gone Girl and the accompanying movie, book titles with the word girl in them have been popping out with predictable regularity. Now with the popularity of The Girl on the Train and its movie, I suspect the trend will continue for at least a while yet. Both books revolve around the disappearance of a woman and the ensuing investigation, which centers on their romantic partners. The characters in both are unsympathetic, bringing their problems on themselves to a large extent. The main character on The Girl on the Train, however, grew on me about halfway through the book. I found the story slow and difficult to become invested in before that point.

Gone Girl was better written, but I didn’t enjoy it. I only finished it because of its popularity. I wanted to see what the public finds worth buying. I have to admit that the murder mystery isn’t my favorite genre, even though one of this book’s twists—one I found obvious—was that the missing woman was not murdered. Unfortunately, I didn’t like her or the accused husband well enough to care how the story turned out, a second twist I found obvious, though there were lesser twists I didn’t see beforehand. Considering the book’s sales, it must be me.

The Girl on the Train seemed to tell a lot of the story—how the character felt, why they felt that way—rather than show it through action, which writing experts warn is the mark of an amateur. They obviously can’t always predict the readers’ tastes. The movie is getting very good reviews and I wonder if the movie is driving the sale of the book, which reads somewhat like a script. This may be the rare case, such as The Prince of Tides, when the movie is better than the book. I haven’t seen either of the girl movies.

The characters in The Girl on the Train made poor choices and did stupid things but it came from personal traumas rather than the nastiness or selfishness central to the characters in Gone Girl, so let the reader feel bad for their predicaments.

One final word on The Prince of Tides—Nick Nolte deserved his Oscar nomination and Barbra Streisand deserved more credit for turning a mediocre book into a wonderful movie.