A Reliable Wife

I just finished A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick. I normally trust a novel that is The Number 1 New York Times Bestselling Novel, but this time i was a little disappointed.

synopsis (thank you amazon):

Set in 1907 Wisconsin, Goolrick's fiction debut (after a memoir, The End of the World as We Know It) gets off to a slow, stylized start, but eventually generates some real suspense. When Catherine Land, who's survived a traumatic early life by using her wits and sexuality as weapons, happens on a newspaper ad from a well-to-do businessman in need of a "reliable wife," she invents a plan to benefit from his riches and his need. Her new husband, Ralph Truitt, discovers she's deceived him the moment she arrives in his remote hometown. Driven by a complex mix of emotions and simple animal attraction, he marries her anyway. After the wedding, Catherine helps Ralph search for his estranged son and, despite growing misgivings, begins to poison him with small doses of arsenic. Ralph sickens but doesn't die, and their story unfolds in ways neither they nor the reader expect. This darkly nuanced psychological tale builds to a strong and satisfying close.


Let me demonstrate how I felt about this book with some imagery...

oh how intriguing... 

AHHHH MY VIRGIN EYES!!!

Parts of this book I found pretty intriguing, it is chalked full of: deceit, murder, fake identities and the author meticulously describes items in great detail without it being over done or boring. However, some of the writing bothered me, there were a lot of fragmented sentences trying to be dramatic but instead i annoyed me and I would catch myself analyzing the writing style instead reading the story. BUT i mostly would not recommend this book because I had to skip a lot of it, as my last photo indicates, because just like the author liked to describe food, clothing, and house furnishings in great detail, he also used way too (i'm assuming accurate) descriptions of sex and the like. Needless to say this book got a lot shorter when I was reading it...

and that, is A Reliable Wife.

Now on to The Power of One... and yes, i accidentally dyed my hair purple...

-Amelia Bedelia