Please note that I received this book via NetGalley. This did not impact my rating or review.
Long story short. This was not the worst book I have read, but it’s up there. I said in some of my updates on other sites I post reviews on that this read like a bad Freida McFadden book and I stand by that. It really does read like one of her books, but somehow dumber? I am trying to not be insulting, but the whole premise of the book makes zero sense and you get told what the main character, Jodie, is up to in literal pages after you begin. Why in the world that wasn’t a slow reveal, I have no idea. Instead, Barelli has us 100 percent inside Jodie’s head the entire book and then tries to do some reveals towards the end, but it just does not work. I also thought the ending was so unbelievably bad I had no words for it.
I am going to summarize the plot as such without revealing spoilers. The Housewife follows 20 something year old Jodie who is newly married (just a month) to renowned psychologist Dr. Roy Davies. Jodie loves Roy and just wants to be a perfect housewife to him and make all of his meals and keep the home clean. Too bad there are many flies in the ointment preventing her from being the perfect housewife. One is that Roy just recently buried his first wife, Deborah. Two, all of Roys’ friends/neighbors hate Jodie and see her as a golddigger. Three, Jodie keeps getting compared to Deborah and is over that. The book follows Jodie as she starts to wonder why if Deborah’s life with Roy was so perfect, why did she kill herself.
Look Jodie isn’t the worst character out there, but she’s up there. I ended up being tired of being stuck in her point of view during the book. I can’t go into too much about her without spoilers again, but it’s not great. The other characters read as caricatures honestly.
The plot such as it is (again no spoilers) was just not there. We got a quick reveal way too soon when you start and then you are just going through the motions of the book so to speak. And I assume we are supposed to be rooting for Jodie, but I was definitely not.
The flow was pretty bad I have to say, again because we got the quick reveal and you wanted the book to hurry up and get to the end.
And the ending….I just didn’t find it believable at all. And then we get a random reveal about something that didn’t even matter in the end.
