Published By: Chatto & Windus
Pages: 356
Released On: 04/04/2024
You wait ages for The One . . . then 203 come along at once
One night Lauren finds a strange man in her flat who claims to be her husband. All the evidence – from photos to electricity bills – suggests he’s right.
Lauren’s attic, she slowly realises, is creating an endless supply of husbands for her.
There’s the one who pretends to play music on her toes.
The one who’s too hot (there must be a catch).
The one who makes a great breakfast sandwich.
The one who turns everything into double entendres (‘I’ll weed your garden’).
And the one who can calm her unruly thoughts with a single touch.
But when you can change husbands as easily as changing a lightbulb, how do you know whether the one you have now is the good-enough one, or the wrong one, or the best one? And how long should you keep trying to find out?
*****
*Contains Potential Spoilers*
Thanks to NetGalley and Chatto & Windus for the advanced copy of this title in return for an honest review.
When I saw this on NetGalley, I thought it sounded like such a fabulous book that I was so eager to get my hands on it. It was original and unique and was thrilled when I was sent a copy.
It unfortunately didn’t hit the high notes I was expecting. But first, the positives.
It did hook me in; I took it with me when I had a day’s tattoo session booked in and so it kept me distracted for several hours. It is completely original and you can’t really look away from it.
It’s funnier than I thought it would. I’m not sure why I wasn’t expecting it to be so, I thought it was going to perhaps be more of a series book, but there is a lot of humour in it, some dark.
It could have quite easily been very repetitive and stale, but I didn’t feel that was the case. We get enough to become invested in the story, and whilst it is repetitive by its very nature, it didn’t feel boring – at least not to begin with. I was quite keen to see who the next husband would be.
It’s a mixture of sci-fi, fantasy, comedy, romance, and feelgood, so it should appeal to a broad spectrum of readers.
Now, for the not so positive aspects.
The consistent character is Lauren, and I can’t say whether I liked her or not. We don’t really get a chance to know her. She’s not developed, and is very one-note. We don’t get to learn much about her past, or her present, we don’t get to know what she’s like as a friend or a relative or a wife, she doesn’t grow or shrink. She’s just….there, and so it’s hard to have any major opinion on her.
My main criticism is I wanted more depth, a bit more oomph and substance. What is there is fine and entertaining, but I wanted more context. This thing just starts happening and Lauren just goes along with it as if it’s a normal thing, there’s no real context to it and we don’t really get to see her genuine reaction to changing husbands coming out of her attic – which I think would cause more than a little alarm. It also ends quite abruptly, and I can’t say it was a satisfying ending either.
There are far too many husbands. I know that’s what the book is about, but by halfway we’d had something like 160 husbands, with a large quantity of them getting 1-2 sentences and then changing. And so we only get to know a handful of them. I think if she’d had less husbands, and focussed more on just a few of them, I would have been more invested and it would have been better.
In its present state, it’s too long. I think either, the story needs to stay the same but the page length shortened, or the story needs tweaking, because at the moment, it’s just too long and doesn’t quite live up to the excitement of the synopsis.
I probably would recommend it, but if it had more depth to it, more context, and more substance, it would have been a far more enjoyable read. I’m not sure if this is her first book or not, I think it is, but either way, there’s a lot of promise here for future works, if only for her originality.
Books By Your Bedside 