Eden Fox lives in a lovely home called Spyglass with her husband Harrison. She moved there only recently, and is excited for the opening of her art exhibition at the local gallery, which will hopefully warm the people in the village of Hope Falls towards her. Only, when she returns home from her run right before the opening reception, her key won't unlock her front door. When the door opens, she is greeted by a woman who looks remarkably like her, pretending to have been Eden all her life. Her husband doesn't recognise her either; he claims to be married to this strange woman. The police are called upon who we know to be the real Eden as she is turned out of her own home. No one believes her, and what was supposed to be 'her night' is now a total disaster.
Meanwhile, six months earlier, Birdy found out she was dying from cancer, and also that she inherited Spyglass from her late grandmother. Birdy leaves London to move to Hope Falls in the present day, and that is when the truth begins to unravel.
I will begin with my positive feedback. The prose was lovely, with some solid metaphors and clever wordplay. When I read the blurb, to say the concept of the book was intriguing, at least the identity theft aspect, was an understatement. Clearly, other people thought so too. When I first placed a hold on the audiobook in Libby, seven hundred people were waiting ahead of me, which is not an exaggeration. Every day, I would check to see where I was in the queue, my anticipation mounting, and finally I was rewarded when it was my turn to borrow the audiobook. Or so I thought.
The first two or three hours were interesting enough, but it all went downhill after that. In the beginning, the author tries to keep Birdy's job a secret, but the scattered hints fail in their objective to be ambiguous. This lack of subtlety leads to another major slip-up, where it becomes evident early on that someone is lying. I will leave you to find out who, if you should choose to read this book. Despite that plot twist being painfully obvious, the rest were not. And that is not to say they were well disguised; rather, they were completely arbitrary. They came in quick succession, and trying to follow along gave me a headache. I appreciate that Feeney was trying to create a complex plot, but it was overdone to the point where it spun out of control, resulting in a garbled mess. Plot twists are only good when they come with some context; and dropping random twists just because one can is going to make readers annoyed, not impressed.
The premise for this book had a lot of potential, in terms of the impersonation of Eden Fox. Instead, that was barely touched upon, while too much time was spent on Birdy. Considering that Eden was a key part of the blurb, I feel deceived and clickbaited. In my opinion, the character development was next to zero, apart from Birdy, who was the only one who felt like a real person. That being said, for the reason mentioned earlier, I wasn't interested in Birdy's story. While the concept of the company Thanatos was very intriguing, I did not fully understand its purpose in the book. That is just one example of the many minor subplots that added to the noise in the story, with no significant value.
I was not a fan of the usage of multiple perspectives in 'My Husband's Wife'. I am not against that style of narration in general; it has been done brilliantly in many other books. I simply think that it was gratuitous here. It crowded the flow of the story. If the author had used fewer perspectives, I believe each one could have been done more justice. In real life, we only know what we are thinking, and I think there is a certain amount of skill in being able to share all the necessary information through fewer perspectives. Multiple perspectives are useful in explaining how different characters feel about the same thing; it's in the name. In this book, however, they were used because everyone was hiding something, and in my possibly unpopular opinion, at least for this particular case, that felt like a misuse of this technique.
As though I was not already overstimulated enough, the audiobook had sound effects. To me, this seems like a cool idea, and yet, at the same time, I believe that the author's words should be given space to breathe, to speak for themselves. The words should be sufficient to convey everything the reader needs to know. The sound effects were not used very often in this audiobook, and when they were there, they were random and distracting. I had to fight the urge to roll my eyes every time they played the running track. The alarm sound was a total jump-scare. I have not given up entirely on the idea of sound effects for audiobooks; I think this was just not the right book for those. The narrators were fantastic, though, and I have no complaints with them.
I do not know how I managed to stumble through the entire book, and I am still wondering what I just read. I would not recommend this book to anyone. Still, I would like to say that writing a mystery requires a lot of plotting, which is not easy, and I appreciate Alice Feeney's effort. I am fully aware that I cannot write at that level yet.