By: Alice Feeney
“Memories and feelings coexist in a close relationship. They’ll lie to you if it means they can stay together.”
My Husband’s Wife
*This post contains spoilers for My Husband’s Wife
Overview:
Eden Fox, an artist on the brink of her big break, sets off for a run before her first exhibition. When she returns to the home she recently moved into, Spyglass, an enchanting old house in Hope Falls, nothing is as it should be. Her key doesn’t fit. A woman, eerily similar to her, answers the door. And her husband insists that the stranger is his wife.
My Husband’s Wife
One house. One husband. Two women. Someone is lying.
Six months earlier, a reclusive Londoner called Birdy, reeling from a life-changing diagnosis, inherits Spyglass. This unexpected gift from a long-lost grandmother brings her to the pretty seaside village of Hope Falls. But then Birdy stumbles upon a shadowy London clinic that claims to be able to predict a person’s date of death, including her own. Secrets start to unravel, and as the line between truth and lies blurs, Birdy feels compelled to right some old wrongs.
Way too many people were the husband’s wife.
Let me explain.
Eden is the actual wife, Mary is pretending to be the wife (but wants to be the wife) and Birdy used to be the wife. Yup, just as convoluted as it sounds.
Just like every Alice Feeney book, you go into it knowing that there will be 1. more than one twist and 2. the reader is going to be lead to believe that the person being referenced is someone else entirely. My Husband’s Wife lives up to this expectation. The twist are non stop. From Birdy being the biological mother of Gabriella to Jane murdering the real Eden.
The person we are lead to believe is someone else is Birdy. It is revealed that Birdy was Harrison’s first wife. Eden’s flashback to the day of Gabriella’s accident was when her and Harrison were having an affair. How it is written leads the reader to believe that Eden is the concerned mother looking for her daughter but in reality she is the nanny/mistress.
The entire time we were trying to figure out if Eden was really Eden. The author wanted the reader to think that Eden was the wife seeing her husband with another wife (and she technically was) but really it was Birdy trying to figure out her husband’s wife’s murder.
Even with the explaination I know it is still overly complicated.
This complication is why the book doesn’t work as well. I don’t know if we needed Birdy to be the first wife. I think had she just been the police officer that ran over Gabriella, it would have been just as effective. The extra twist of her being his wife made the whole thing way too messy.
Overall,
The book lived up to Alice Feeney’s reputation. Full of twists that make sense but seem highly improbable.
Once you read a few of her books, the novelty wears off a bit. Does that mean that I won’t read her in the future? No. They’re still fun popcorn stories that entertain and can be used as a good palate cleanser for more heavy books.
Rating: 2.5/5 stars
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