Book Review: The Wives by Tarryn Fisher

The Wives

by Tarryn Fisher

I picked this book up because some friends wanted to read it as a group. Then I found I needed something to distract me this past weekend so I read straight through.

I’m not sure if the author intended it, but I didn’t realize the main character’s actual name was until probably three quarters of the way through the book. I suspect she may have intended it, so I won’t give it away here.

From my perspective, the narrator has a very warped perspective and that’s apparent right from the first paragraph, “That’s how women are, right? Always wondering about each other – curiosity and spite curdling together in little emotional puddles.”

It’s a thriller and we start out with the narrator clearly intent on keeping her husband focused on her with sex, because she feels she has to compete against two other women in his life, his two other wives in a plural marriage.

“My life is almost perfect,” she says, but it doesn’t sound it to me.

He shows up on Thursdays and spends the night with her, then he spends two other days with the other wives, whose names she doesn’t even know as the story starts.

But she isn’t satisfied, she wants more of him, even as his third wife is pregnant with his child. The narrator is his second wife.

She is obsessed with him, and wants him all to herself. “…everything I am is reserved for him. As it should be.”

She begins to search for the other women, and you know that can’t end well.

There were a few turns of phrase early on in the narrative that made me cringe. The narrator describes “the fat of the lamb congealing around the edges of the serving dish in oranges and creams” though she is out of the room. That threw me for a moment because she couldn’t be observing it.

I didn’t like the narrator at first but I quickly felt sympathy for her, for the untenable situation she had gotten herself into because she loved this man.

But it isn’t remotely that simple, and things deteriorate fairly quickly. You have a feeling that something else is up. I questioned whether she was a reliable narrator, and she was but she wasn’t, and it wasn’t as simple as that.

In the end, it was a distracting and fascinating read with great tension and I didn’t see exactly where it ended upcoming at all!

I don’t read thrillers that often but I might look for another by this author.