How To Be a Good Wife: A Novel
How To Be a Good Wife by Emma Chapman is a haunting literary debut about a woman who begins having visions that make her question everything she knows
Marta and Hector have been married for a long time. Through the good and bad; through raising a son and sending him off to life after university. So long, in fact, that Marta finds it difficult to remember her life before Hector. He has always taken care of her, and she has always done everything she can to be a good wife—as advised by a dog-eared manual given to her by Hector’s aloof mother on their wedding day.
But now, something is changing. Small things seem off. A flash of movement in the corner of her eye, elapsed moments that she can’t recall. Visions of a blonde girl in the darkness that only Marta can see. Perhaps she is starting to remember—or perhaps her mind is playing tricks on her. As Marta’s visions persist and her reality grows more disjointed, it’s unclear if the danger lies in the world around her, or in Marta herself. The girl is growing more real every day, and she wants something.
ASIN : B00CQY9E9G
Publisher : St. Martin’s Press
Accessibility : Learn more
Publication date : October 15, 2013
Language : English
File size : 3.0 MB
Screen Reader : Supported
Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
X-Ray : Enabled
Word Wise : Enabled
Print length : 287 pages
ISBN-10 : 9781250018205
ISBN-13 : 978-1250018205
Page Flip : Enabled
Best Sellers Rank: #589,359 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store) #1,414 in Psychological Literary Fiction #3,042 in Mystery, Thriller & Suspense Literary Fiction #3,661 in Mothers & Children Fiction
Customer Reviews: 3.5 3.5 out of 5 stars (1,196) var dpAcrHasRegisteredArcLinkClickAction; P.when(‘A’, ‘ready’).execute(function(A) { if (dpAcrHasRegisteredArcLinkClickAction !== true) { dpAcrHasRegisteredArcLinkClickAction = true; A.declarative( ‘acrLink-click-metrics’, ‘click’, { “allowLinkDefault”: true }, function (event) { if (window.ue) { ue.count(“acrLinkClickCount”, (ue.count(“acrLinkClickCount”) || 0) + 1); } } ); } }); P.when(‘A’, ‘cf’).execute(function(A) { A.declarative(‘acrStarsLink-click-metrics’, ‘click’, { “allowLinkDefault” : true }, function(event){ if(window.ue) { ue.count(“acrStarsLinkWithPopoverClickCount”, (ue.count(“acrStarsLinkWithPopoverClickCount”) || 0) + 1); } }); });
Original price was: $15.00.$1.99Current price is: $1.99.
How To Be a Good Wife by Emma Chapman is a haunting literary debut about a woman who begins having visions that make her question everything she knows
Marta and Hector have been married for a long time. Through the good and bad; through raising a son and sending him off to life after university. So long, in fact, that Marta finds it difficult to remember her life before Hector. He has always taken care of her, and she has always done everything she can to be a good wife—as advised by a dog-eared manual given to her by Hector’s aloof mother on their wedding day.
But now, something is changing. Small things seem off. A flash of movement in the corner of her eye, elapsed moments that she can’t recall. Visions of a blonde girl in the darkness that only Marta can see. Perhaps she is starting to remember—or perhaps her mind is playing tricks on her. As Marta’s visions persist and her reality grows more disjointed, it’s unclear if the danger lies in the world around her, or in Marta herself. The girl is growing more real every day, and she wants something.
ASIN : B00CQY9E9G
Publisher : St. Martin’s Press
Accessibility : Learn more
Publication date : October 15, 2013
Language : English
File size : 3.0 MB
Screen Reader : Supported
Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
X-Ray : Enabled
Word Wise : Enabled
Print length : 287 pages
ISBN-10 : 9781250018205
ISBN-13 : 978-1250018205
Page Flip : Enabled
Best Sellers Rank: #589,359 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store) #1,414 in Psychological Literary Fiction #3,042 in Mystery, Thriller & Suspense Literary Fiction #3,661 in Mothers & Children Fiction
Customer Reviews: 3.5 3.5 out of 5 stars (1,196) var dpAcrHasRegisteredArcLinkClickAction; P.when(‘A’, ‘ready’).execute(function(A) { if (dpAcrHasRegisteredArcLinkClickAction !== true) { dpAcrHasRegisteredArcLinkClickAction = true; A.declarative( ‘acrLink-click-metrics’, ‘click’, { “allowLinkDefault”: true }, function (event) { if (window.ue) { ue.count(“acrLinkClickCount”, (ue.count(“acrLinkClickCount”) || 0) + 1); } } ); } }); P.when(‘A’, ‘cf’).execute(function(A) { A.declarative(‘acrStarsLink-click-metrics’, ‘click’, { “allowLinkDefault” : true }, function(event){ if(window.ue) { ue.count(“acrStarsLinkWithPopoverClickCount”, (ue.count(“acrStarsLinkWithPopoverClickCount”) || 0) + 1); } }); });
10 reviews for How To Be a Good Wife: A Novel
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Karen Joyce Peper –
Was She Or Wasn’t She?
The characters in this novel are well crafted…especially the character of Marta aka Elise. Is she losing her grip on reality or was she subjected to the horrors she “thinks” she remembers? Although it begins slowly and rather groggily, as the story unfolds it takes on a nice pace. I do have say that the ending was somewhat disappointing, but appropriate. This was an easy read and entertaining. I would recommend this to others
Angela Risner The Sassy Orange –
Quick read – but didn’t love it
I really wanted to love this book. I adored Before I Go to Sleep, and this book was compared to that one, so I was excited to read it.The book follow Marta, who is married to Hector and mother to Kylan. Marta has been medicated for some time for an unnamed mental issue (though one may guess she is bipolar at the very least.) Marta has decided that she doesn’t want to take her pills anymore, though she fakes taking them in front of her husband. She begins to question her past, as she can’t remember a time before she was married to Hector.Again, it’s hard to discuss why I didn’t love it without revealing key points, so…SPOILER ALERT!1. Marta keeps seeing this girl in pajamas. Sometimes they’re clean, sometimes they’re dirty, blah blah blah. I found that part of the story to be extremely disorienting. Yes, I get that she is the girl, but the writing is so disjointed that I just wanted to speed right through those parts.2. Because the book had been compared to Before I Go to Sleep, I knew right away that Marta was the sympathetic character. However, she was also the very annoying sympathetic character. And then she just became the annoying character.I will say that before I knew for sure that the girl Marta kept seeing was herself, I did wonder if Marta had a daughter who had died, so the author was able to pull that ruse off successfully. Either way, Hector was never a sympathetic character. I figured he was either at the very least a cold person or at the most a pedophile/murderer.The ending…it sucked. I know that not every story can be tied up in a neat bow. And I guess if Kylan really did do a search on Marta’s supposed real name and nothing came up, then she is mentally ill. But it just felt so unhappy, so dissatisfying.It’s okay, but I wouldn’t say I’d recommend it.
R. Heart –
A truly beautiful book
Five stars absolutely! Oh, my……what a wonderful idea for a book. My heart was heavy at times for Marta. I didn’t care for her husband or his mother one bit! And then as Elise is presented, my heart hurts so for her. But we would do anything for our children, as Elise does. The ending was perfect…….what else could a mother do to not see the pain in her son’s eyes. A great book that I wish would get the topic of mental health more out in the open. To get people to see it not as an illness but as a question of health. Our government, our healthcare providers, and we ourselves should stand up for recognizing it in this way and not to see it as something shameful. And to see it not be abused as this book so beautifully illustrates.
Elizabeth –
Hated the ending!
I was more than 60% through the book before it engaged me. Page after page of a meek housewife hallucinating (or remembering?) and hints of a dark and troubled past.Her husband begs her to take her pills – he even puts them in her mouth but she doesn’t swallow them because she wants to come to grips with the strong images and flashbacks that torment her. I was rooting for her to take her pills just like her husband so I wouldn’t have to read any more of this. But then we start to believe that Marta is not hallucinating but rather remembering real events that happened before her marriage – terrible events involving her husband. The reader starts to believe that maybe Marta is not “crazy” but rather the victim of a terrible crime…The ending is terribly disappointing – completely unsatisfying. I understand that the author wanted to explore the complex psychology of memory, but I want good guys to prevail and bad guys to be punished. And I didn’t get that satisfaction.
RZK –
This one will stick with you.
I must be in the minority, but I did not find that this book moved slowly. That’s not to say it was a fast-paced, twisting, turning novel. It was precise and methodical, but I was captivated from the start. I found the story unique, while still being plausible – not an easy feat when constructing these “amnesia” types of stories. I read this book in just a few days, which is rare for me. It is not an outright scary book, but I would say it is subtlety suspenseful. Marta is a dutiful, if not unhappy, housewife, who suddenly starts “remembering” things for the first time, that paint a very different portrait of her marriage, especially how it came to be. The idea that begins to form in her head is terrifying, but the author explores something that I find even more terrifying – the idea that something terrible has happened to you, but you can’t get anyone to believe you, because they think you’re crazy. Or is Marta really crazy? I will tell you this, you might be a bit unsatisfied by the ending, as we never get 100% closure. I’m still not quite sure how I feel about it, but the fact that I’m still thinking about it says a lot.
womersley –
An unusual story of a depressive woman. What a pity that there are so many people in this world, unhappy in their skin!!
C.Tonkin –
Keeps you guessing. You feel for the female in this tale of deception.
johnsjen –
As an infrequent fiction reader, and much less a reviewer, I found this book simply brilliant. The author’s rich and eloquent descriptions provided for vivid mental imagery and total immersion into the story, which made it extremely difficult to put down. Infact if it wasn’t for the necessities of sleep and work I would have read it in one sitting. The story itself takes you through a whole range of emotions: intrigue, curiosity, suspicion, apprehension, frustration, compassion, anger and a kind of peaceful satisfaction. My only niggle was that as a person who tends to read more factual books, I wanted an ending with finite answers. That said, the author provides enough cues to allow you to draw your own conclusion, and I am happy in doing that. An excellent, well-written piece, and an absolute pleasure to read.
Dee –
Intriguing plot that kept me engaged and well written. Unfortunately I did not like the ending at all as it was somewhat predictable and frustrating. That’s where it lost marks for me.
margaret –
I found this a very interesting book, was keen to find out what had happened in the past. I did twig quite early on, with the clues given, where it was going. I found the wife Marta quite unsympathetic at the beginning, and I never liked Hector the husband at all with his controlling, dictatorial ways. However I still couldn’t put it down, and as the story unfolded it was really quite sad, towards the end I was moved to tears. I wished it had had a more positive satisfying ending, I was really rooting for this and felt deeply disappointed.