Protected: Weekly Update | 01 Jan 2023
January 2, 2023
WW | 2023 | Week 1
January 9, 2023
348 pages
Published: August 3, 2021
by Flatiron Books
Read: January 2023
Nora Spangler is a successful attorney but when it comes to domestic life, she packs the lunches, schedules the doctor appointments, knows where the extra paper towel rolls are, and designs and orders the holiday cards. Her husband works hard, too… but why does it seem like she is always working so much harder?
When the Spanglers go house hunting in Dynasty Ranch, an exclusive suburban neighborhood, Nora meets a group of high-powered women–a tech CEO, a neurosurgeon, an award-winning therapist, a bestselling author–with enviably supportive husbands. When she agrees to help with a resident’s wrongful death case, she is pulled into the lives of the women there. She finds the air is different in Dynasty Ranch. The women aren’t hanging on by a thread.
But as the case unravels, Nora uncovers a plot that may explain the secret to having-it-all. One that’s worth killing for. Calling to mind a Stepford Wives gender-swap, The Husbands imagines a world where the burden of the “second shift” is equally shared–and what it may take to get there.
Main Characters
- Nora
- Cornelia – psychologist
- Hayden
- Francine – Cornelia’s daughter
- Penny – advice writer, husband was killed in a house fire
- Cornelia’s crew – includes: neurologist, real estate agent, policewoman, basically any high powered woman that can fill out her roster
- Gary – Nora’s ‘boss’
My Review
While this book is fiction, it hit home in multiple parts with the mental burden that tends to fall on the wife’s in a relationship.
“The lazy traveler. It’s a theory about couples. Two people are traveling together, and no matter what their two individual personality types might be, one person will start doing, right? That person figures out which way to the metro, what the day’s itinerary is, how to exchange currency, all that stuff, and the other one, they sit back.” He laces his fingers behind his head and leans back to demonstrate, chest puffed out. “Because it’s being done for them. They don’t pay attention to which way they’re going. In fact, they probably wouldn’t even be able to find the nearest metro station if they were plopped alone right back on the same spot they started from. They’re along for the ride. Because they can be. They become the lazy traveler.”
– Chandler Baker, The Husbands
Nora and her husband Hayden are looking for a new house with their expanding family. Nora thinks she has hit the jackpot at a showing in Dynasty Ranch. The house is perfect and the moms in the neighborhood seem like the friend group that Nora is has been trying to find. The mom group asks for Nora’s help with investigating the death of one of the husbands in the group – he died in a house fire and they want to make sure that their friend, Penny, is taken care of. As Nora investigates the case and spends more time with the group, she find that the husbands are all very eager to help out with everything around the house.
The book does have the gender reversed Stepford Wives vibe. It was predictable but enjoyable. It started out at a good pace, while Nora is trying to come to terms with being pregnant with a second baby, juggling motherhood and trying to become partner at her firm, and trying to find friends and a new house to live in. Hayden seems like a great husband and father – it was SO relatable to be in Nora’s head during their arguments though. Hayden was always willing to help when told what to do – but when he is home watching the toddler and she is having a tantrum, he has to call his wife and send her a video of how the tantrum is ‘not normal’.
“We can elbow and push all we want for every packed lunch, picked-up towel, put-away pan, and scheduled doctor’s appointment, but until paternity leave is normalized, until schools call fathers about sick kids as often as they call mothers, until sons are given not just the same number of chores but the same types as daughters, until the helpless sitcom dad with a tool belt isn’t quite so loveable, I’m skeptical of how much ground we’re really gaining.”
Likes
- I really enjoyed the parts between the chapters of the different forums and articles with comments regarding male/female roles in relationships
- The relationship that the moms seemed to have (at the beginning of the book, before you realized exactly what was going on) – it really did seem like the ideal friend group
Dislikes
- Gary, her boss – ah!!
- The pace was a little off? Seemed like it took a little too long to get into the meat and potatoes of the plot
- The ending seemed a little rushed and that there should have been a little bit more
- A couple of the side storylines didn’t seem completely necessary
Spoilers
*SPOILERS – Do NOT expand this section unless you want to know the spoilers!*
Cornelia had grown up in a community that worked on controlling people. She set up her counseling to control the men’s brains using the clicking of a pen to have the do everything the wife wanted and then some. She thought this was a way of being equal and allowing powerful women to get their shot as equals to men.
The neighborhood women were behind the house fire. They had drugged Penny’s husband because he wasn’t behaving the way they wanted him to. Penny didn’t want to play along anymore either so they have Norah’s husband steal her sleeping pills, drug Penny and push her down the stairs. Nora’s secret was that she had taken a sleeping pill and her daughter had fallen down the stairs at 16 months old and gotten severely hurt. Nora finds out and convinces them to let her go. She backs out of the home purchase in the neighborhood and moves into a different neighborhood. Her husband goes back to normal. Nora’s boss dies of a heart attack and she ends up getting his work. The ending of the book, Nora is fed up that Hayden isn’t helping like she wants so she takes the pen out of the drawer and clicks it.