The Wives

This book is garbage.

CW: infertility, miscarriages (early and late-stage), gaslighting/emotional manipulation, emotional abuse, physical abuse, unnamed mental illness

So let's start here: I like stories of polygamy/polyamory. It's not a lifestyle I can imagine for myself, and I find it interesting to live in someone else's shoes for a little bit. I should have eaten The Wives up with a spoon.

The blurb is grossly misleading. That is not what this book is. You think you know what you're getting, but this book has more twists than a crazy-straw. I'm not sure how to review this without putting spoiler tags all over it, so be forewarned that Beyond This Point There Be Spoilers. (I want to promise that I'll try not to ruin it just for the hell of it, but the idea of someone else picking up this book ... I literally threw my copy across the room, then threw it in the recycle bin, so I make no promises.)

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Things I Hated:
• Mental illness as a twist - most of my problems with this book boiled down to this.
• Using the trauma of a late-stage miscarriage and birth, hemorrhage and subsequent loss of reproductive organs as the impetus for descent into madness.

Look, I'm not saying that it's impossible, but I reject this notion as the book's theme; it's no longer a book about polygamy at this point! Now it's about Thursday being crazy, and imagining all this shit? While Seth denies the plural marriage, even though he is literally sleeping with all three women despite only being married to one of them (and it's not the one you think)?????

Things I Hated, Cont'd:
• Convenient Memory Loss. About so. much. stuff.
• Seth. What an asshat.
• Regina emotionally manipulating Thursday into believing that Seth had intentionally aborted both Regina's and Thursday's pregnancies. And making Thursday fear that Seth would do the same to Hannah.

Ohhhhhh that made me RAGE. Like it's not traumatic enough to lose a baby more than halfway through a pregnancy, you're seriously going to introduce the idea that Seth intentionally killed multiple of his own children while they were still in the womb? At the risk of his wives? Knowing that Thursday is struggling to identify what's real and what's not??

Things I Hated, Cont'd 2:
• Regina. I mean, I get her hatred of Thursday, as the usurped first wife, but bitch! You don't do that.
• I stopped being sure that Seth actually existed at one point? Like, I couldn't keep it straight what the story was supposed to be. Did Thursday make up the marriage? The person? The other wives?
• Did I mention I hated the convenient memory loss???

I didn't even hate Thursday as the narrator, because I believed her for so much of this! (You gotta believe the women!) But even though Seth is supposed to be the one who was trying to get out of a bad/scary relationship with Thursday, he still comes off as the bad guy.

I got to the end and I was mad, and then I cried because of the way loss is portrayed and used as a manipulation tool, and then I was mad again, and then I couldn't sleep, so this is what you get.