Four Wives

A new year...and finally a new book review!!! I am hopelessly behind on my reviews, so I am vowing to get caught up and will start with:

Four Wives by Wendy Walker

I got an Advance Copy of this book from one of my friends from FSB Associates. I think it is wonderful that they are looking at the blog world as a source of publicity, marketing, gathering feedback, etc. I especially enjoy finding the occasional typo or even better, editing error. Enough about my strange fascination with reading books before publication!!!

Four Wives gave me pause...making me think about other books I've read about groups of women and how groups of women are stereotyped in fiction. Think about the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. It was entertaining...but there's only so much drunk mother/dysfunctional family lit you can take before you begin to doubt that anyone has a clue about what really happens in adult women's minds and in their relationships.

Four Wives is a story about complicated women with complicated lives and deep issues that compel them to examine the lives they are leading and examine their true selves. There were a couple of passages that hit home with me especially hard:

"It was not a terrible life. Janie Kirk was a suburban housewife, the steadfast bottom of the inverse pyramid upon which the demands of her family balanced."

I don't think anyone has captured that feeling as simply and eloquently as Wendy Walker does in this one short passage. It appears early enough in the book that you can relax and know that you are going to be reading something more serious and with greater depth than your typical over-the-top, crazy mom stories.

Throughout the book, Walker poignantly captures the essence of adult womanhood, the strains of the mother/daughter dynamic, the intensity of adult female friendships:

"nothing in my life is real until I tell you about it."

I hope Amy is reading this and nodding because this describes our friendship. We experience things both by doing them and by mentally preparing to tell one another about them.

The situations with which each of the four wives is struggling are neither stereotypical or simple. The complexities of their characters are explored by the descriptions of their struggles and their interactions with one another. Keep in mind, this is Wendy Walker's debut novel! Pretty impressive...and I hope we'll be seeing more from her in the future.

Di

Comments

[jen]

you've sold me....i've added this to my "to be read as soon as it comes out list"