Spoiler warning! This is the third book in the Grisha trilogy and therefore NOT the place to start reading. This review will contain at least some minor spoilers for the previous books in the series, and who starts a trilogy with the third book anyway? Go read from the beginning, starting with Shadow and Bone. This review will be here when you're caught up. 

Alina is shadow of her former self, trapped in tunnels underground, "protected" by the zealous Apparat (former high priest of Ravka) and his devoted followers, who worship her as a living saint. She is unable to summon her powers, but has to put on a show for the crowds (aided by illusion and trickery) to placate the high priest. She drained herself completely in her last confrontation with the Darkling, intending to kill them both. Now what remains of Ravka's royal family may be dead, the Second Army is in tatters, and Alina and her tiny band of loyal friends have to figure out a way to get above ground and away from the religious fanatics. 

Having confronted the Darkling twice, without having been able to best him, Alina is convinced that what will make the difference is a third amplifier, making her the most powerful Grisha since the legendary Morozova. They need to track down the elusive firebird of myth, and from poring over Morozova's old journals, they suspect they know where to begin looking. Alina also wants to ascertain whether Prince Nikolai and his parents survived after the Darkling's attack on the palace. Having been beaten twice, just makes Alina more determined that the next time they meet, she will defeat the Darkling once and for all. Little does she know that getting the third amplifier could end up costing her more dearly than she could ever have imagined. 

As in a lot of trilogies, the first book introduces us to the characters and the world, the second brings our protagonists further into the story, but also brings them oh so low, so that they have to overcome all odds and make it to the end triumphantly. Alina is broken in body and spirit, having nearly drained herself trying to stop the Darkling at the end of the second book. She would have died if Mal hadn't insisted on carrying her away, aided by a handful of loyal Grisha, while Prince Nikolai did his best to rescue his parents and escape, so he could return and fight again at a later date. Hidden in an intricate network of caves far away from the Darkling's reach, Alina can't access her powers at all while she's so far underground. The Apparat would prefer a dead martyr to a living girl, and closely guards his precious figurehead, trying to make it impossible for her and her little band of followers to plot and scheme. Nonetheless, they manage to orchestrate an escape and having had time to heal during her stay underground, Alina is relieved to discover that her powers aren't actually lost.

In a series that has already explored some pretty dark themes, this book was the darkest of all. Alina is obsessed with finding the source of the third amplifier, even after discovering what the search did to Morozova all those years ago. The idea of all that power is incredibly alluring to her, even though she knows that it could make her tip over the edge into madness and corruption, turning her just as monstrous as the the Darkling. Having seen her willing to kill herself to stop the Darkling, Mal is no longer trying to keep his distance from her, instead doing his best to help and protect her. For a lot of the book, they are aided only by a ragtag group of Grisha, and the odds of their succeeding in a third confrontation with the centuries old sorcerer are so slim. 

I was really impressed with the final quarter of this book, and where Bardugo took the story. I'm not sure she needed to go to the lengths she did to establish that yes, the Darkling is totes evil, so evil, you guys. The choices facing Alina and Mal towards the end are not easy ones, and the sacrifices required to ensure victory are staggering. Some might say that the very end is a bit of a cop-out (and all those people pissed off that Alina didn't end up with the Darkling should have their heads examined), but I felt that due to what came before, it was earned, and the epilogue was bitter-sweet. 

While I'm totally on board with Alina as a heroine in this one and didn't actually feel Mal was a total waste of space in this one (he still ranks behind pretty much any of the others in the supporting cast), I am still baffled by much romantic attention she keeps attracting throughout the series. Made no sense to me, and I didn't think she had chemistry with either of them. As a character in her own right, she goes through a hell of a lot of challenges over the course of the trilogy and her personality develops a lot.

Based on this book, I would feel comfortable recommending the trilogy to others. I found the first book a bit hard to get into (and Alina alternately boring and unbearable), the second book was a lot more entertaining, while this was a thrilling conclusion, which did not go in the direction I was expecting. Having heard great things about Bardugo's new series, I now no longer feel I would be cheating in some way when I start it. It just seems right to read things in the correct order.

Judging a book by its cover: It seems fitting that the third and darkest book in the trilogy has a colour scheme evoking blood, fire and ashes. The firebird that Alina is searching throughout crowns the top of the book, while a dark city appears to be burning in the central image. I mentioned in my review of the previous book how much I love these covers. That bears repeating. They are very striking and I love how each of the books' titles give the reader a glimpse of what to expect.

Rachel, trying to drown the sorrows of her recent divorce in alcohol and denial travels to London on the train every morning and back to the suburb where she shares a flat with an old friend in the evenings. As she passes the area where she used to live, she observes a seemingly golden couple and makes up a fantasy narrative about their life to comfort herself in her loneliness. She's named them Jess and Jason and believes them to have a perfect relationship, in contrast to her miserable life, post failed-marriage.

One day, she sees "Jess" kissing a man who is most certainly not "Jason" in the garden, and this causes Rachel to have a minor breakdown. Waking up after a particularly epic drinking binge, she has a cut on her head, several bruises and absolutely no memory of what happened, but she believes it may have involved her old street, and possibly seeking out her ex-husband. She also discovers from the news that Megan Hipwell, as "Jess" is really called, has disappeared.

Rachel knows (as everyone else) that the husband is always one of the main suspects in disappearance cases. She believes very strongly that "Jason", in reality Scott Hipwell, couldn't have hurt his wife. She's determined to notify the police about the strange man that she saw Megan with from the train. Due to her habitual drunkenness, Rachel's not really treated as a reliable witness by the police, further hampered by the harassment complaints made about her by her ex-husband's new girlfriend. Because she knows the police aren't taking her seriously, Rachel feels compelled to contact Scott as well, pretending to be a friend of Megan's. She needs him to know about the man Megan was seeing.

As she keeps returning to the area where she used to live, where Megan disappeared from, Rachel struggles to remember what happened to her on the night she has completely blacked out. She knows she was in the area the same night that Megan left her home - could she have seen or heard something that could help the case?

The Girl on the Train came out in early 2015 and has been reviewed a lot of times on the Cannonball Read already. I've seen it compared to Gone Girl in the press (really not a fair comparison at all) and the movie version starring Emily Blunt as Rachel is about to be released in cinemas. I put it on my TBR list when it came out, and have kept putting it off for various reasons. Now that the movie is right around the corner, I figured I should read it, so movie reviews didn't spoil the book for me. I didn't know that much about the details of the book, and probably wouldn't have chosen to read about a fairly broken woman, struggling with alcoholism and reconciling herself to a divorce in part caused by her involuntary infertility struggles, when I myself am trying to get over my own very recent failure at yet another IVF attempt. I had figured a mystery suspense novel would be a good break from the romances I normally read, where quite a lot of the books end with pregnancy and the heroines always seem to be frustratingly fertile. So this book, not the best choice to read right now.

I can only assume that The Girl on the Train has been frequently compared to Gone Girl because they both feature quite unlikable female protagonists, there is a disappearance in both books, suspense/mystery novels written by women. There are also unreliable narrators in each of the books, but having read both novels, the similarities are superficial at most, and when you get down to it, they are very different books within a genre. I'm not going to go into other ways in which they are different, as that would spoil the reading experience.

Much of the book is told from Rachel's POV, but due to her drinking, we cannot entirely trust her memories or narration. There are also sections from Megan's POV, which start more than a year before she goes missing. It gives the reader insight into her actual life, which is a lot less idyllic than Rachel's fantasy narrative. There are also some chapters from the POV of Rachel's rival, Anna, the woman her husband had an affair with, who now lives in her former house, with Rachel's ex-husband, raising their baby girl.

Rachel used to work in marketing, but lost her job after turning up to work drunk. She still goes back and forth into the city, so as to not alert her flat mate to the fact that she's unemployed. She's suffered drunken blackouts more than once, and while her ex-husband's cheating contributed to the dissolution of the marriage, Rachel's depression and increased drunkenness after the failed fertility treatments caused her to act violently and erratically and their marriage had no hopes of surviving. Rachel is still a bit obsessed with her ex-husband and the reason Anna reported her to the police is because she once showed up at their home and snatched up their baby while Anna was napping. In fact, after this episode, that increased Anna's anxiety about Rachel (who keeps calling and occasionally shows up to talk to her ex, Tom), was the reason she hired Megan as a babysitter for a time, although Megan quit from boredom after only a few weeks.

While the book is a bit slow to start (and I really didn't enjoy spending so much time in Rachel's drunken, self-pitying head), it builds the suspense nicely and gets more exciting as the story unfolds. I figured out the identity of the killer (this is not a spoiler, it's obvious from the very first page that Megan ends up dead) some time before it was revealed, but that may very well have been intentional. It certainly adds more to the tension when the reader knows more than the characters in the book, and just waits for them to catch up. The book didn't entirely work for me (but again, that could have been because it further exacerbated the pain of my own recent failure to conceive a child), and I found it a bit confusing in places. Nonetheless, I can see why the book has become so popular and I'm sure the movie will be entertaining.

Judging a book by its cover: As far as I can tell, the version I read, has the movie tie-in cover, which means it just features the movie poster on the front. A train in the background with one lit-up window, speed lines illustrating the speed of the moving train. Slight blurring of the font and the movie tag line underneath. I don't really care for tie-in covers, but it was what I got. I don't think this poster is what's going to sell the movie.

Sometime in the first decade of the 20th Century, young Miss Lucy Honeychurch is in Florence with her older, constantly worrying cousin Charlotte Bartlett as companion and chaperone. When they discover that the rooms they've been assigned have no nice view, Lucy is disappointed. An older gentleman, Mr. Emerson, offers to trade them, as the rooms he and his son were given have lovely views. "Ladies care about that sort of thing, men do not". Miss Bartlett is worried about the impropriety of the trade, that accepting the rooms may leave them in debt to these strangers, but is convinced by other guests, and Lucy gets her view.

During her stay in Italy, Lucy discovers art and architecture and when she manages to escape the overbearing presence of her cousin, she quite enjoys herself. Luckily, Charlotte makes friends with the vaguely ridiculous lady novelist, Eleanor Lavish, so seems a bit distracted much of the time. Lucy has several encounters with the Emersons, who seem to have fairly radical notions for the time, both of social and gender equality. George, the son, seems to be of a rather gloomy and melancholy disposition, but the father is always cheerful and friendly.

While on one of her rambles, Lucy witnesses a man being stabbed to death in square, swoons and wakes up in the arms of young George Emerson. Later, during an outing in the Florentine countryside, George kisses Lucy on a hillside covered in violets, but they are interrupted by a shocked Charlotte before anything else can happen. Miss Bartless whisks her charge off to Rome before anything else untoward can happen, and Lucy and George don't see each other again.

Several months later, back in England, Lucy accepts the marriage proposal of Mr. Cecil Vyse, the third time he asks her for her hand (the first having been in Rome and the second in the Alps). Lucy's brother Freddy is none too happy about this turn of events, as he finds Cecil a stuffy and pretentious bore, but Mrs. Honeychurch is pleased for her daughter, as the Vyses are in a more rarefied social circle than the Honeychurches. Lucy's future looks set to be predictable, respectable and rather dull, with her thoughts, tastes and opinions carefully curated by her future husband. Then the Emersons unexpectedly let a house in the neighbourhood and Lucy is suddenly torn as to what she really wants.

I loved the 1985 Merchant Ivory film version of A Room with a View, with Helena Bonham Carter as Lucy, Julian Sands as George, Maggie Smith as Charlotte Bartlett and Daniel Day-Lewis at his most pompous as Cecil. At least I did when I saw it, many years ago. It's a visually stunning film and seemed ever so romantic, despite the slow pacing. I had never read the book, so when my Monthly Motif Challenge for November called for a book written before 2000, this seemed like a good opportunity. Sadly, while I'm sure it deserves its position as a literary classic and most likely brilliantly skewers the stuffy ideals of Edwardian society, I was hoping for more of a stirring romance and was quite disappointed, and bored by the book.

There are very few encounters between Lucy and George at all, and to make matters worse, later in the novel, when the kiss in Florence is discussed between Lucy and Charlotte, it seems to suggest that George only kissed Lucy on the cheek. I honestly don't see why this would cause such terrible consternation, with the event being brought up again and again over the course of the book. Charlotte just cannot leave the event well enough alone and even gossipped about it to Eleanor Lavish, who stole it and put it in her next lurid novel, also set in Italy. That a reading from said novel prompts George to kiss Lucy again, this time in a shrubbery, elicited a lot less excitement when there was the possibility that he may just have pecked her on the cheek again.

Of Lucy's suitors, Cecil is clearly the worst (in every sense of the word), although it is clear that that is exactly what Forster is going for. George isn't that much of an appealing catch either, mainly morosely slouching through beautiful Florence having to have his father plead his case for him with Lucy. He doesn't really put up that much of a spirited competition once he returns on the scene in England either, except the aforementioned shrubbery kiss and to exclaim in disgust that Lucy actually wants to marry pompous prig Cecil.

Not that Lucy is all that much to cheer for either. She's a bit wet, really. She does have the excuse of being a young woman in a time and society that didn't exactly value brains, independence or pluck in females. Her visit to Italy clearly starts her down the path of thinking for herself, until returning to England makes her believe she'd be better off just conforming. All the while, her most prominent character trait seems to be that she's a skilled pianist and her fondness for Beethoven seems to symbolise the hidden passions that might be unleashed, should only the right person come along. I only wish that Forster had shown me that George actually had anything worth stirring that passion in him.

I'm now actually afraid to go back and re-watch the film, in case I just imagined all the smouldering romance of it. I'm sure this is a very good book, but it is not at all what I was expecting, and hence I cannot rate it higher than I have. Your mileage may vary.