My Husband’s Wife by Alice Feeney
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 this stranger is his wife.
One house. One husband. Two women. Someone is lying.
Six months earlier, a reclusive Londoner named 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.
For the Reading Challenge(s):
2026 52 Book Club Reading Challenge (Prompt #43: A Goodreads recommendation for you)
The Reason
It was already on my TBR and I was looking for a book that fit the above prompt, and this book turned up in my Goodreads recommendations!
The Quotes
“Your biggest enemy is always the person you see in the mirror.”
“People are grief vampires. They just want to suck on your sorrow, feed on your fear, and feast on your failures. It makes them feel better about themselves.”
“Some people love a good party; personally, I prefer a good book.”
“Accepting that things change and learning to navigate wrong turns is the secret to a happy life.”
The Narrator(s)
Bel Powley. Henry Rowley. Richard Armitage. It was a great cast and I enjoyed all of the narration.
My Thoughts
I’m not sure where to start with this book. I had very high hopes for it because it has been reviewed so highly and it started so well. It really devolved at the end, however, to the point where I wondered if I had been reading a completely different story and missed important details or imagined the whole first half of the book.
I get the concept of the unreliable narrator and that mystery fiction tend to hide the true story from us, but the way this story is presented and told is just sloppy, inconsistent, and undeveloped. The characters blatantly gaslight the reader in the weirdest ways and it makes me wonder what exactly are we reading on the page? Are we reading the character’s internal thoughts on the page? Are we reading their diaries? Are they writing down false information to mislead us? Who exactly is their audience? Because it doesn’t make sense for them to say the things they say throughout the whole book when we finally get to the reveals.
It’s just plot hole after plot hole after plot hole, and I have no idea what the story is trying to achieve. I don’t get it and I’m very disappointed.
My Rating
2/5 stars.
Have you read this book? Would you read this book? Did you like the book or do you think you would like it?