Story for the Week
When I was a kid, we knew the vast majority of the neighbors on our dead end street. The Morris family lived next door. The Andersons lived across the street. The Moyers family lived next to the Andersons until the Bradfords moved in. The Vegetables lived next to them (and yes, that was really their last name), then the Barrons, the Costas, and the Greders.
There was an older man and his wife who gave the neighborhood kids candy with no ill intent. For Halloween, my mom would hand out bags of popcorn, and no one worried that it was laced with anything. They just knew it came from us.
The Morrises and the Andersons each had a son, but they were older than the rest of us, so we didn’t really socialize with them as much as all the others. We used to draw gigantic hopscotch boards with the Moyers kids. I got dropped out of the fort the Vegetables had in their backyard. The Costas moved before the oldest daughter started high school, and we spent as much time at the Greders home as they did at ours.
All of our moms got together while we were in school, we all played together on snow days. The Bradfords were (and still are, as far as I know) bikers, and they would let everyone know when they were going to have a bunch of biker friends camping out in their yard.
The point was that we knew one another. We talked to one another. Most of the kids I grew up with are in my Facebook friends list because we really are friends. All of the parents looked out for all of the kids. If one of the kids did something wrong, their parents probably knew about it by the time they got home. And we listened to everyone else’s parents as if they were our own.
When my husband and I bought our own home, we made a point of getting to know the neighbors. The family to our left has a giant decorative stone in their front yard that our daughter has loved to sit on since we moved in 13 years ago. The mom has joked that she can’t wait for our daughter to pose for a prom picture on their rock. The house on our right is on its fourth family since we moved in, but we’ve introduced ourselves to each one. Whenever the kids see us outside, they wave and say hello.
The next family to the right includes one of my daughter’s very best friends and practically another daughter to us. The family three houses to the right is the home of our daughter’s first friends. Shortly after we moved in, we had just come home from the store, and the four kids walked down with a soccer ball and started playing with our daughter on the front lawn.
These families are extended family to us. The sleepovers, the parties in the backyard, these are memories that define our daughter’s childhood. Over the years, we have shared laughter as well as tears, celebrated birthdays and graduations. We have watched all of the kids grow up, and these families are a huge part of our life. But I know we aren’t the norm anymore. We made a point of getting to know our neighbors because that’s how we grew up, but I think we’re in the minority nowadays. Many people don’t know their neighbors, don’t watch out for anyone’s kids but their own, don’t know the names of the strangers who surround them.
A while back, I read a book about neighbors, a thriller worth revisiting. These neighbors are quite a bit scarier than mine. How well do you know your neighbors?
Book Review
⭐⭐⭐½
3.5 Stars For The Other Wife by Claire McGowan
322 pages
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Publication Date: October 24, 2019
I received an advance copy of this title from NetGalley and Thomas & Mercer.
Publisher’s Description
She’s a total stranger. But she knows who you are…
Suzi did a bad thing. She’s paying for it now, pregnant, scared, and living in an isolated cottage with her jealous husband, Nick.
When Nora moves into the only house nearby, Suzi is delighted to have a friend. So much so that she’s almost tempted to tell Nora her terrible secret. But there’s more to Nora than meets the eye. It’s impossible—does she already know what Suzi did?
Meanwhile, Elle spends her days in her perfect home, fixated on keeping up appearances. But when her husband betrays her, it unravels a secret going all the way back to her childhood. She’ll do whatever it takes to hold on to him, even if that means murder. After all, she’s done it before.
Caught up in their own secrets and lies, these strangers will soon realize they have more in common than they could ever have imagined. When a shocking event brings them together, their lives will never be the same again.
************
Claire McGowan’s The Other Wife plays on a common theme of a woman scorned, but in this case, there are three women and we’re not sure at the start who is the scorned and who is the scorner. I had a difficult time following the story until about a third of the way through, which is one of the things that knocks the rating down a bit.
The book begins with an untitled chapter showing us a female character moving away from a house on fire. We don’t know who she is or how old she is, but we can tell that she is intentionally walking away and probably had something to do with the fire. When she sees Sebby calling to her from a window, she runs back. We don’t yet know who Sebby is in relation to her, but she clearly did not intend for him to be in the house.
Then Part One begins with rotating chapters between Nora, Suzi, and Elle. Nora has just moved in to a cottage home in a remote area, where she lives across from Suzi. Nora is alone but seems confident. Her chapters are narrated in the first person.
Suzi’s chapters are also in the first person, but she is narrating to an as-yet unknown person (not her husband) with whom she clearly had a relationship. She is afraid of her husband, Nick. She worries when he has arrived home early and she isn’t dressed and hasn’t started dinner. Elle is the most insecure of the three characters. She constantly worries that something has happened to her husband when he is the slightest bit late coming home from work. He does his best to allay her fears when he arrives but expresses concern that she’s “going funny again.”
For good measure, the author throws in a handful of chapters about Alison, a detective constable, with a chapter heading of February and either “three months later” or “two months later” in relation to a body found frozen under the snow. There are also a few chapters near the end about Maddy, which I believe are meant to hint at a big reveal, but I had already figured it out by then.
The narration in these chapters seems to have been set up to help keep the characters straight, but because the author is trying to keep the secrets secret, the male characters are almost all referred to with pronouns, so it took me a while to be able to keep the women straight. I kept flipping back to remind myself which one was which. In terms of “time,” we know that Nora and Suzi are in the same timeframe since they are neighbors, and Alison’s chapters always follow Suzi’s so Alison is a few months in the future, but we don’t know when or where Elle’s chapters take place, so this was intentionally but unnecessarily confusing—even knowing the ending and the who/what/where of all the story lines.
About a third of the way through the book, at the end of Part One, we start to see the connection between Elle and the other two women, and that’s when the book starts to make more sense and get interesting. I figured out many of the secrets long before they were revealed, but this was still a solid 3.5 star read.
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