The Husband's Secret

There's a lot to like about Liane Morairty. She writes these compulsively readable books about complicated women making difficult choices. I'm a little bit in awe of the way she balances that dark complexity with her breezy style. Her books feel half as long as they actually are because I read them so quickly.

The Husband's Secret is about the fallout after a wife discovers a terrible secret that her husband has been keeping from her for as long as they've known each other. Her perfectly ordered world starts to crumble as she tries to figure out what to do with her knowledge. And the longer she waits to make a decision, the harder it becomes to do anything at all.

Her story intersects with that of two other women. One is the elderly secretary at her daughters' primary school who lost her own daughter thirty years previously. The other is another mom who is in town ostensibly to help out her injured mother but is really fleeing from the news that her husband has been contemplating having an affair with her cousin.

The three women's stories don't intersect quite as neatly as I wanted them to. It seemed like two of them were completely entwined while the third was just skating around the edges, ultimately unaffected by the main drama created by the husband's secret.

I also didn't really like the ending, which was messy and unsatisfying and made me feel incredibly uncomfortable. Which was probably the point. But throughout the book, Moriarty keeps bringing up all these could-have-beens, and they contrast weirdly with what actually happens. And the way justice is presented in the book had my skin crawling. It didn't feel like justice at all.

After Big Little Lies, this book was something of a letdown. It was a little looser, a little more raw, and much less satisfying. I wanted more from it. Maybe that can be attributed to the growth of the author and I'll enjoy her newer novels more. But this has made me hesitant to pick up any more of her books. No matter how engrossing they are.

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