The Wife Between Us and Other November Reads

In November I finished sixteen books:

Come Sundown by Nora Roberts (audiobook)
The Girl in the Steel Corset by Kady Cross
The Rule Maker by Jennifer Blackwood
Blue Smoke and Murder by Elizabeth Lowell (audiobook)
The Wife Between Us by Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen (ARC)
Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell (audiobook)
The Titan’s Curse by Rick Riordan (reread)
Teach Like a Champion 2.0 by Doug Lemov
Landline by Rainbow Rowell (audiobook)
The Indian Clerk by David Leavitt
The Crystal Scepter by C.S. Lakin
The First-Year Teacher’s Survival Guide by Julia G. Thompson
Throne of Glass by Sarah J Maas
Mosquitoes Don’t Bite Me by Pendred Noyce
The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue by Mackenzi Lee (audiobook)
The Duchess by Danielle Steel (audiobook)

I received an Advanced Readers’ Edition of The Wife Between Us by Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen from the publisher (St. Martin’s Press) as part of a Shelf Awareness giveaway. This book is scheduled for release in January 2018.

This is the story of Vanessa, a woman who has recently split with her husband, Richard. Her ex is moving on without her, seemingly happy and content with his new, soon-to-be bride. Vanessa is fairing less well. She seems to be struggling with depression, with alcohol, with grief for the relationship she has lost.

Vanessa is obsessed with Richard and his new relationship. She is unable to move forward with her new life away from Richard.

To avoid spoilers, that is almost all I can say about the plot of this novel. There are numerous shifts and twists as the story moves forward, some that work very well, some that I struggled with a bit more.

While I really enjoyed the first half of this novel, and fell into the characters and their individual issues, I hit a stumbling block at the midpoint. There is a huge turn at this point, which there typically is in a novel. This turn was a reveal, a piece of information that changes the context of everything that came before it and sets the stage for everything that comes after.

My problem was that this piece of information was one that the narrator had for the entire story, and did not share with me, the reader. This can work in a story if there is a good reason for the narrator to keep the secret. In this case, I saw no reason for the secret, no benefit to the narrator in keeping me in the dark. Instead, I felt that I had been deliberately tricked. And not tricked by the narrator. I felt the presence of the authors at this point in the novel. I felt that they had deliberately mislead me.

This feeling of being tricked by the authors pulled me out of the story. I had a very hard time connecting with the characters in the second half of the novel. I was hyper-aware of the authors standing over the shoulders of the characters, nudging them down certain paths, telling them what to do.

Possibly because of this feeling of the authors standing over me and the characters, the resolution of the story felt both clunky and too neat and tidy at the same time. I felt that the authors had placed marks for the characters to hit at the end, and then manhandled the characters into those perfect positions.

Trust, betrayal, and manipulation are themes that run through this story. So maybe it was an intentional choice of the authors to make the reader struggle with all of those things in the second half of the novel.

I guess I really should have seen all of those feelings coming. The back of the book does say “Assume nothing. Read between the lies.”