The Woman in Cabin 10 (Review)

On anyone’s journey into the mystery-thriller genre (a journey which I have personally only recently begun) one will be guaranteed to meet with Ruth Ware.

When I saw The Woman in Cabin 10 on Scribd (a monthly subscription service and app which lets you read and listen to unlimited books), I decided it was time to get acquainted. 

After a traumatizing burglary at her flat, Lo does not feel ready to jump aboard the luxury cruise ship, the Aurora Borealis, on its maiden voyage. But covering this story could be what she needs to finally get a promotion. 

It’s especially hard to focus on travel journalism though after Lo meets the woman in the cabin next door, a woman who everyone else is sure doesn’t exist. 

“We all have demons inside us, voices that whisper we’re no good, that if we don’t make this promotion or ace that exam we’ll reveal to the world exactly what kind of worthless sacks of skin and sinew we really are.” 

This story gave me major Flightplan vibes…except, you know, the plane was a cruise ship. 

The novel throws you into the action quickly and has a good build of tension. Reveals are paced well in the beginning, giving you hints before there’s any time for things to get dull and creating a complexity of clues that are a good amount of frustrating to figure out. I found myself flipping pages avidly in anticipation of more and more information.

I enjoyed the writing but struggled at times to connect to the characters. Lo was a difficult heroine for me to engage with; most of the decisions she made were the opposite of what I would have done. She trusted people I thought that we had seen to be totally untrustworthy and didn’t trust others for seemingly no reason. She told people information, and how much she knew, even when she suspected their intentions were bad. I was frustrated with her at times for not thinking of one key clue or another, or of not being more aware, or more cautious, or so on. 

It didn’t help that Lo made an unnecessary amount of comments about her peers on the boat being fat. I wasn’t invested in her struggle with anxiety, either, which was not done in completely bad taste but not in what I would call ‘good taste’ either. The inclusion of her anxiety is clearly and simply a plot device, and is extremely surface level. It is more or less seen as a way for people to call her ‘crazy’ throughout the book while having some sort of explanation as to why that’s not a totally inappropriate thing to say.

None of the other characters were particularly likable in order to offset not liking Lo, but then again, they weren’t meant to be. The real problem with the secondary characters was that I had a hard time even telling them apart for long stretches of time. We are introduced to them in two big sections, one for guests and one for the crew, in classic here-are-all-the-people-you-need-to-know-about-and-what-they-look-like style. We might as well have gotten lists, they might have actually been more helpful. It was difficult to retain all this information when it was thrown at me at once. Later on, I would often read a name on the page without being able to connect it to a description or other events and places. Of course, most of the time spent on the minor characters turn out to be misnomers anyway, so it was a waste of time to really try and remember them.

“There’s a reason why we keep thoughts inside our heads for the most part—they’re not safe to be let out in public.” 

Still, the mystery might have allowed the story to remain relatively strong even with these factors…if the reveal had been great.

The moment that is supposed to be the most riveting and exciting fell very much flat. Not only because we learn that all the complexities were a web around what turns out to be a rather trope-y and predictable situation, or because we get this reveal in true I-will-now-tell-you-everything-and-all-my-motives fashion which makes me cringe so much, but because it occurs with over 100 pages left to go. 

This meant that, at that point, the book switches gears completely from a mystery into what I can only describe as an action novel (is that a genre?).

Without the whodunit element in this last section to catch my attention and drive the story forward, I felt my interest slipping. I didn’t care enough about Lo or anyone else in the story to feel invested in what happened to them beyond mild curiosity at how it would turn out and a vague hope that perhaps another twist would occur (spoiler, it didn’t). 

In the end, I found this book a bit too long, a bit too predictable, and overall just generally forgettable. I rated it 3 out of 5 stars.