I read My Husband’s Wife by Alice Feeney with my book club recently and crashed out so hard on the group call, I think my fellow book clubbers are now concerned for me. AND it brought me out of my temporary YouTube retirement because I wanted to rant about this book so much. The video went up the week before last and if you’d like, you can watch it here: My Husband’s Wife by Alice Feeney Rant.
Before I get into my thoughts about it, I must give you a quick heads up that since my issues with the book are all plot related and logic-related, this post will have spoilers. So please read at your own discretion.
Alright, moving on… First off, My Husband’s Wife was my first Alice Feeney book and I had high hopes from it because I’d heard a lot about her writing. Be it His & Hers, which is now a TV show, or Daisy Darker, or Beautiful Ugly. All of them hooked me from their blurbs, and so did My Husband’s Wife, which I thought I would love because of the premise and that very intriguing title. And though I did like parts of it, I ended being unimpressed overall because of the numerous holes in plot and logic.
The Plot:
This book starts off with Eden Fox going for a run in the small village that she and her husband have just moved to. When she returns home, she finds that her key doesn’t fit and a woman, who Eden notes, looks just like her, opens the door claiming to be Eden Fox. Even her husband says that this stranger beside him is his wife. Eden feels like she’s going mad because everyone in the village vouch for the strange lady, saying that she is the real Eden Fox.
Six months before this – which is a weird time jump, if you ask me – in London, Birdy has just been diagnosed with cancer. She also learns that her grandmother left her a house called Spyglass in a little village called Hope Falls. The same house that Eden and her husband are living in in the present.
She makes her way to Hope Falls to see what the fuss is all about. She talks about how people at work are surprised she wants to leave but we don’t know what exactly it is that she does. While in Hope Falls, Birdy learns that her grandmother knew the exact date that she would die. She follows this lead and from this, numerous different threads seem to emerge.
The question is… Who is telling the truth? Because someone in this whole cast of characters is definitely lying.
The Positives:
Before I move on to my rant, let me just say that it was not all bad. It had some great things going for it.
One, the overall plot was fantastic. The nuances, the shock factor to the revelations — all of it makes complete sense.
Two, the plot twists twisted perfectly well. I feel like if I were vlogging my reactions, you’d have seen the number of times I gasped in complete shock at all the reveals.
Three, the narrators, Bel Powley, Richard Armitage, and Henry Rowley did a great job of bringing life to the story. Not to forget the background sounds, the footsteps, the sea, car doors and house doors opening and closing — they were done really well.
And last but not the least, the grand reveal was brilliant, even though I have many issues with how it came to be.
That’s all the positives I can manage to dredge up from my memory for the book.
The Rant
Now moving on to what I didn’t like about My Husband’s Wife by Alice Feeney. There’s going to be a lot of spoilers in this section, so beware before you move forward.
- My initial reaction the moment I finished reading this book was of heavy annoyance and I couldn’t even tell you why. It took me a while to put a finger on the actual reasons because in hindsight, the holes in the plot and the logic were glaring back at me like huge red signs.
- The writing feels very standoffish, especially the way the plot twists were introduced into the story. They didn’t feel authentic and instead felt like the author dumped them in a huge clump towards the end. To be fair, the plot twists were doing their thing perfectly well, but I think what kind of dampened it for me was the presence of TOO many of them. They didn’t feel strategically placed for them to end up having a great effect.
I also have quite a few complaints from the plot of My Husband’s Wife itself:
- How did no one from the village see Eden or Mary? How did the whole lot of them accept one for the other? Plus, Mary was Olivia Bird Sr’s carer for 20 years. Give over!
- What was the whole point of Thanatos? I thought it was going to be relevant to the plot but it somehow felt unnecessary. And how didn’t Birdy know that Thanatos was her ex-husband’s company? WTF?
- The cancer merely giving her few minutes of pain each time and her using meds to handle it felt a bit weird. Is there some cure for cancer that she has? Or what?
- Oh and the most obvious: HOW did Harrison make all the changes in the one hour Eden was gone? I get it that he had help but COME ON. Not THAT many.
- Why oh why was Birdy shocked to see a picture of her daughter in the house she was supposed to live in? I get that it was probably the first time in a long time that she was seeing a picture of her daughter as a child but still feels off.
- Someone on Goodreads asked a valid question: “Wouldn’t the doctors have realized that Gabriella’s injuries were due to falling from a height vs. being hit by a car?” Which is, honestly, a great question. Because of all the plot twists that came in towards the end, this was the one that tangled everything into a huge mess.
- Over all of this, this just felt like the characters were straight up lying to the reader and to themselves instead of them using facts in twisted ways to get to the truth. I get it when you artfully craft a story using actual facts related to the characters and then gradually revealing them as the story goes by. But for the story to pull the wool over readers’ eyes in a “gotcha!” moment isn’t the way to go. My opinion is that it is lazy writing, as if the author is saying, “It’s my world, I’ll change it whenever the heck I want!” It may be true but at least be truthful to your readers and your characters! I get that the point was the characters being unreliable narrators, but let them be unreliable narrators. Not lying narrators!!
- Towards the end, we find out who killed Eden and the reasoning that this person gives should also be applicable to Birdy. But Birdy gets away and I don’t even remember if this is resolved, to be honest.
- Speaking of Birdy getting away, miracle anything in any book always has me looking sideways at it. Because what do you mean that one of the biggest plot points, which was so important to the book as YOU established, was moot all along? If you ask me, this is another case of lying to the readers but this time, it’s because the author couldn’t be bothered to bring a different, more nuanced ending to the story. It is merely overexplained just so the author could wrap it up.
- And last but not the least — the Day of the Dead!! This village of white people claiming to have come up with the whole concept!! What the hell?? It’s DIA DE LOS MUERTOS! Not whatever you thought you invented by coopting a Mexican festival! Good Lord.
So now when I look back on it, of course it had so many problems that I couldn’t really put into words. Pacing, every character being an unreliable narrator, twisty words that served no purpose other than to mess with the reader in multiple “gotcha!” Moments — I’m just realizing that this book annoyed me way more than I realized. And that’s a loop if ever there was one!
What did you think of this rant-y post? Have you read My Husband’s Wife by Alice Feeney? If yes, what did you think of it? If not, will you be picking it up now? Let me know in the comments below. I’d love to hear from you!
Thanks for reading this far!
I hope to see you in the next blog post.
Until next time, keep reading and take care! 🙂
The Melodramatic Bookworm 