Thursday’s husband, Seth, has two other wives. She’s never met them, and she doesn’t know anything about them. She agreed to this unusual arrangement because she’s so crazy about him. But one day, she finds something that tells a very different—and horrifying—story about the man she married.
... it all breaks down in the second half when she’s checked into a psychiatric hospital. This unsettling effect carries over to readers as the story flounders in details and sudden revelations and suffers from a violent ending that feels abrupt and unfinished ... This domestic suspense is recommended for fans of Louise Jensen’s The Surrogate or Carol Goodman’s The Other Mother. The language is edgy, but readers eager for a new thriller release will most likely snap this up.
[A] clever and twisty psychological thriller ... Twists, surprises and characters who are not what they appear to be make The Wives a quick and enjoyable read. The situation is so unusual, and so distasteful to most of us, that we really want to know how it all ends.
[A] compelling anthology ... Several features distinguish this collection including the range of experience covered, a uniformly sophisticated attention to language that manages to convey painful truths in cogent creative prose, an unwillingness to settle for pat answers and easy solutions and, finally, the fact that virtually any woman reading this book will find herself or someone she knows if not literally at least metaphorically in its pages ... One clear strength of Burn It Down, then, is its wide-ranging subject matter and ease of reader association ... powerful ... As this urgent anthology reminds us, the time to burn down the systemic edifice of violence, misogyny and the host of other toxic constructs that seek to dominate women’s lives is long overdue.
