By the time I got to page 100 of Jane Corry’s debut novel My Husband’s Wife, I felt like it 
was too late to abandon it even though I didn’t like any of the characters. I just don’t get why this book garnered so much praise. Geesh, Parade even compared it to Gone Girl!
Lily is a brand new solicitor in London. She’s also newly married to Ed, an artist. Theirs was a whirlwind romance, and I am not joking. They married about two weeks after meeting. Lily has some dark secrets in her past, though, and she is hoping that this marriage will help her move on.
Her first professional job is to meet with Joe, a guy serving time for scalding his girlfriend to death. Yes, you heard that correct. Joe is an odd man, but Lily finds herself strangely attracted to him.
Then there’s Carla, a nine-year-old, who lives with her single mother. They are Italian, which is apparently cause for much ridicule…in London…in 2000. Carla is picked on mercilessly by the other kids, has no friends and is not even cared for by the teachers at her school. She is a strange child, no question. Her path crosses with Lily’s because they live in the same apartment complex. Soon Lily and Ed are looking after Carla when Carla’s mother is “working” (code for meeting her married lover).
One of the issues I had with My Husband’s Wife is that there is SO much going on. There’s Joe’s case. There’s Carla’s sad little life. There’s Lily’s precarious marriage to Ed. There’s her secret past. And then the novel flashes forward twelve years.
Carla returns to London from Italy where she’s been living with her mother and grandparents. She is bent on revenge for some imagined slight. She reconnects with Lily and Ed; she thinks she is owed a great deal of money because of a painting Ed did of her as a child. Lily and Ed now have a son, Tom, but he has Asperger’s and is too difficult to handle, so they’ve shipped him off to live with Lily’s parents in Devon. Lily is now a well-respected lawyer because of what happened with Joe. Her marriage, however, is less successful. And she still has her dark secrets.
It’s not that I couldn’t keep up with all the plot’s machinations, it’s more like I just didn’t care about them and that has less to do with the plot points and more to do with the characters. Not a single one of these people were sympathetic (perhaps with the exception of Lily’s parents) or even all that believable. I felt like I was being told a story, rather than experiencing events as they unfolded.
Just a huge disappointment…and yet I did finish it, so I guess that’s something. And I suspect I am in a very small minority of readers who didn’t like this book.
The Ludic Reader 