"Remember Me This Way": A Creepy, Twisted and Slow Burn Thriller

How well do we really know anyone?

Sabine Durrant's dysfunctional marriage thriller "Remember Me This Way" goes beyond the surface of the secrets in a marriage between a sociopath and an introverted librarian that he stalks and eventually marries to show how easy it is to be deceived.

I'm not always a huge fan of thrillers - especially thrillers that show how messy marriages between crazy people can be.  Infidelity, twisted psychotic episodes, abuse - both mental and physical . . . all of these traits seem to mark the "must reads" that deal with dysfunctional marriages.  Just like in "The Girl on the Train" Sabine Durrant gives us a clingy, passive woman as a main character.  Lizzie unlike Rachel in "The Girl on the Train" has some desirable traits.  For one, she isn't drunk all the time, and for the most part, she doesn't tell lies to everyone that she knows.  Lizzie's conflict is her husband's tragic death which happened a year before the book begins.  Due to her guilt over feeling a little bit relieved after his death, she hasn't been able to visit the site of his car accident.  When she musters the will to go there, she finds flowers from a woman named Xenia there already, and she begins to unravel the secret life that her husband, Zach led.

Was anything that he told her true? If he really was a horrible person, what does it say about her that she really loved him? What does it say about her that she often felt responsible for his abusive and erratic behavior?

The narration switches back and forth from Lizzie trying to figure out what really happened to her husband and what he was really up to during their brief and tumultuous marriage.  She also wants to answer the questions that she has about whether or not he even died or if he is just waiting to punish her for the break up letter that she sent to his art studio.  In Zach's chapters, the reader becomes privy to the world of a misanthrope who never really tells the truth to anyone in his adult life, and about how easily he can camouflage himself into the nice guy or the new guy or the artist guy.  It's a dark world that Zach inhabits full of stalking just to see if he can get away with it and a trail of lies and abhorrent behavior with people who foolishly trust and even love him.

Lizzie's story is sad, but Durrant handles her codependent behavior with care.  She gives Lizzie a backbone (even if it isn't a very strong one).  The biggest downfall in this novel for me was the ease that Lizzie excepted the obviously troubled and incredibly spooky teenager, Onnie, into her home.  Although Lizzie felt reservations in allowing Onnie into her life, she caves quickly due to the pity she feels for her.  I never got a true sense of Onnie, and I never really wanted to.  She was more of an annoyance even though her story was integral to the plot.

Overall, I found Durrant's book to be a sly and well crafted thriller that felt perfect for an overly rainy week of summer.  I flew through it, and was satisfied with the outcome.  Something about this dysfunctional marriage rang more true than the relationships in the wildly successful "Girl on the Train" characters and their flawed love lives, or even "Gone Girl" and the sadistic nature of the wife who wants to punish her husband for his infidelity.  The pace wasn't as break neck, but quieter and even a bit repetitious at parts.  Nevertheless, I enjoyed myself while reading it, and recommend it to anyone looking for a quick thriller for the beach.

"The Girl on the Train": Get Me Off Of This Ride

I know that "The Girl on the Train" is the "IT" book right now.  Everyone is comparing it to "Gone Girl" because of the mystery, the intensity of it, and the thrill ride and pace of the plot.  I couldn't wait to read it, and was bummed when we went on vacation and it had not arrived at the library yet for me to take with me.

When I saw it at the airport bookstore, I bought it even with the hefty hardcover price. Having a good book with me makes any vacation feel complete.  I started to read it and was immediately sucked into the story of Rachel, a depressed, jilted, obsessive, alcoholic who is pretty much a train wreck.  She spends her mornings and early evenings on the London bound commuter train staring out the window and making story lines about one stop in particular and one couple in particular.  She's basically stalking the couple from the train until one day she sees something that disturbs her and that sets even more disturbing events into motion.

I can't reveal too much more about the plot or the characters because it will spoil the book which many of you will read even if I tell you not to.  Because that's what I'm going to do - tell you not to read this book, which will then make you want to read it even more.

Why should you stay away from Paula Hawkins' thriller that is gracing the Bestseller list and flying off the shelves (even at the airport bookstore)? The characters are all so unlikeable that it didn't really matter to me what happened to them after I read the first 100 pages (which I did read very quickly).  I get it.  We all have a dark side, but when ALL the women are depressed and co-dependent in some way or another (a door mat, a stalker alcoholic, a stay at home narcissistic brat, and a liar and cheater), and all the men are abusive tyrants, it makes for an unlikeable cast of characters that might even deserve the tragedies that befall them.  This is a VERY harsh statement, too because what happens to them isn't really all that pleasant. But I know that you know the feeling in a horror movie when the dumb girl leaves by herself to take a midnight walk in the woods because she is depressed about her ex-boyfriend and she doesn't listen to the advice of all of her friends to stay close and then the guy with the chainsaw comes up behind her and she just stands there crying before she even hears the chainsaw, and then you think "you had it coming to you because you are a ridiculous human being" . . . well, that's what I felt pretty much the whole way through this book.

It also feels much like being on a commuter train - monotonous, repetitive, and dreary.

The writing was okay, but nothing too bold or beautiful.  Getting the multiple perspectives from the different, broken women was nice, but may have revealed too much.  It would have been an interesting twist to just stick with Rachel's perspective the entire novel.  With such an unreliable narrator, the book could have created more edginess or even more intensity.  It certainly would have lead to a more dramatic and original unfolding.  It's no good when the reader can figure out the mystery with over 100 pages yet to read.

I wanted to like this book, but it wasn't what I thought it would be.  I regret spending the money on it at the airport bookstore and regret even more that now I own it.  This isn't a book I will be loaning to others unless they insist that they must read it, which I know that even after I tell them not to, they will anyway.