I shouldn’t have even bothered to put this up here. I don’t usually finish books as stupid as this one and I can’t say as I actually read the whole thing. The reason is that I slept through close to half of it and when I woke up decided to listen to the ending because I was curious. That doesn’t count as really reading a book but I did read the first 3 hours and the last hour or so – that’s about half of it.
The Wives
by Tarryn Fisher
2019 /
Read by Lauren Fortgang 9h
Rating D and might even be DNF – ??
***Massive Spoiler Alert ***
The basics are that the 1st person protagonist has an affair with a married man and gets pregnant. The wife, who is unable to have kids, finds out. The wife leaves him and our protagonist person loses her baby and is then unable to have children. So the man, who has his own set of lies marries someone else but he can’t quite get rid of the mistress. There’s a lot of lying and story-telling – mostly by the protagonist to herself and on top of that she’s paranoid. Finally, at the end, there’s a shooting (no one dies), a trial and a mental hospital.
The narrator is totally unreliable and takes denial to a whole new level. When her troubles mount she creates an alternative reality going so far as creating or destroying physical evidence to prove it. At the end she’s still not well and creates more damage. Okay fine. Don’t bother.
Becky's Books - 
I hear you. Whether I should/shouldn’t review an unsatisfactory book is something I still wrestle with, after all these years. My rule is that if I finish the book I review it and I give my honest opinion, which can have the effect of warning others off. If I don’t finish it, I don’t review it on the blog, but usually comment to that effect at Goodreads, and give a brief indication of why. I don’t rate books I don’t finish either, and I recently changed my the name of my ‘abandoned’ shelf to ‘partially read’ because there are some books I don’t finish because of lack of time, or because it’s a dip-into-rather-than-read-all-of-it book.
But the problem with this is, how then to express discontent with woeful books? People who read our blogs draw conclusions from what they read there, and if we don’t review something woeful because it was just too awful to bother finishing it, there’s a vacuum.
OTOH I’d always rather be sharing what’s good to read than criticising what’s not. It’s tricky!
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Yes – when I woke up and found out how far I was in this particular book, I just didn’t want to bother. I was curious though, about how the silly thing ended. So I did that – I figured an hour should do it.
Usually when I wake up and find I have slept through any part of an audio book I go into it and find something I remember that happened BEFORE I fell asleep and reread from there. I don’t mind that at all. A lot of times I reread a whole book from any point simply because I got confused in the narrative at any point.
I don’t think I’ve ever before reviewed something I haven’ actually finished. On the plus side of this book I was apparently hooked enough to want to know what happened but if this had been a library book (instead of on sale) I doubt I would have bothered.
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LOL What wakes you up, the ear buds digging into your cheek?
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I have no idea what wakes me up. Probably having to pee. Living alone I almost never use earbuds.
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