Book Review: Husband and Wife by Leah Stewart

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husband and wife cover
Synopsis:
In HUSBAND AND WIFE, she tackles the underside of the supposed “fairytale” ending that marriage represents for many women — this is not your typical “damsel in distress” story where the heroine gets saved by her handsome prince and everything and everyone is tied up into a pretty red bow.  Reality and real people fill her pages and not everything turns out the way the reader may want it to. 


In her youth, HUSBAND AND WIFE’S heroine Sarah Price had dreams of becoming a poet. But the meticulously responsible 35-year-old traded her MFA for a steady job that allows her husband, Nathan, to devote himself to his fiction. And there are two small children who need their mother’s attention as well. But Sarah is happy and she believes Nathan is too, until she discovers that his new novel, Infidelity, is based in fact. Suddenly Sarah’s world is turned upside down. Adding to her confusion, Nathan abdicates responsibility for the fate of their relationship and his novel’s publication—a financial lifesaver they have been depending upon—leaving both in Sarah’s hands. Reeling from the betrayal, she is plagued by dark questions. How well does she really know Nathan? And more importantly, how well does she know herself?

For answers, Sarah looks back to her artistic 20-something self to try to understand how she got to this place and what happened to her dreams. Attending to her own needs for the first time, she begins to address everything she has neglected: her blank computer screen, her best friend Helen, the volumes of Proust on her bookshelf. And there is that email in her inbox: a note from Rajiv, the beautiful man who once tempted her to stray. The struggle for which version of herself is the essential one—artist, wife, mother, responsible adult—takes Sarah on a surprising journey.


About the Author: the author of the novels The Myth of You and Me and Body of a Girl. A recipient of a 2010 NEA Literature Fellowship, she has taught at Vanderbilt University , Sewanee, the University of the South, and Murray State University , where she was the Watkins Endowed Professor of Creative Writing.  She currently lives in Cincinnati , OH with her husband and two young children, and teaches creative writing at the University of Cincinnati where she also helps host an author series: http://www.artsci.uc.edu/collegedepts/english/events/.  For more on Leah Stewart, visit: www.leahstewart.com.
About the book she says: When I started Husband and Wife my daughter was three and my son was seven months old.  What was on my mind was motherhood, and how it affects your self, your marriage, and your work.  But as my grandmother once told me, motherhood is all-consuming, and yet there's very little to say about the daily act of mothering:  the diapers, the bedtime books, the lost mittens, the mac & cheese. So how to make the subject interesting?  I needed a crisis in my characters' lives to throw the way they lived into sharp relief, and the crisis I chose was infidelity.  Nothing causes you to examine a bond like a betrayal of it.

Review: WOW- I thought this was going to be a slow read. WRONG, once it got it's foothold, the story just rushed! It's hard to say that a book about betrayal is a page-turner but it is! It seems very odd to me that the collective unconscious is urging authors to suddenly writing books like this and Love in Mid Air, about MATURE women having to make decisions that may not always be the ones we expect. It's as if the axis has changed and it's OK to say, NO I will NOT do what you expect!  The author brings the hard decisions into an understanding light and makes you stop and think WHAT IF. Would you do as the main character in the book or not? Even if you are happily married, I think all women should read this book before motherhood. The author has ALOT of unspoken (before now) realities of marriage after kids come along and the changes that occur when the boundaries of marriage are changed.

Learn more about Husband and Wife at the HarperCollins product page, and find out if Leah Stewart will be in your area on her book tour.

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Disclosure: This book was sent to me free of charge, for review purposes, by Harper Collins. I was not told how to review it however.