The first book I picked up this school year came as a gift from a local Buy Nothing neighbor. (If you aren’t familiar with Buy Nothing, look it up in your community! I love their gift economy…less waste, more gifts!). One of my neighbors was offering “The Wife Upstairs” by Rachel Hawkins as a gift and I thought it would be a great place to start this year’s reading adventure. What I didn’t see coming were a few plot twists that kept me up WAAAAAAY too late and left me rambling to a car full of 8th graders about the chapter they just forced me to put down by being dismissed from school! (Side note, the rambling worked because my daughter picked up the book the same day I finished it…then ran back inside the next day to grab the book off her nightstand because she couldn’t “leave Jane and Eddie at home all day!”). It was also the kind of book that caused my husband to state, “I forgot how obsessed you get when you are reading a new book.” He’s not wrong.
The novel starts innocuously enough. Jane (not her real name) is running from her past, (you find out later exactly what she’s been running from, and it’s hard not to have sympathy for her) is trying to find her footing in a new town but finds herself smack dab in the middle of a very wealthy neighborhood in Alabama as a highly sought after dog walker. “Behind every one of these McMansions is a bright green backyard, so it makes no sense that anyone would even need a dog-walker. But need is not a word people like this think of. Everything with them is want.”
It’s the kind of neighborhood that is easy for any young adult to fantasize about living in one day, (“Here, the grass is green no matter the time of year, and every house has flowerpots or window boxes, or huge bushes covered in colorful flowers. The shutters are bright yellow, navy blue, deep red, emerald green. If there’s any gray at all, it’s soft and elegant- dove gray, I heard Mrs. Reed call it.”) Fantasizing about living in Thornfield Estates is especially easy for Jane given her past. From the get go you find out that Jane is an opportunist; stealing jewelry from her clients to sell to pawn shops (they have the kind of wealth that allows them to not take inventory of their own valuables). She suddenly finds herself face to face with the neighborhood’s most eligible bachelor; widowed Eddie Rochester.
The love story of Jane and Eddie is like a speeding runaway train. You can almost feel the inevitable ending as they fly down the tracks. There are cringeworthy moments (Jane literally taking on the role of Eddie’s deceased wife at a community gardening club meeting) and moments of deep empathy. Watching Jane change her camouflage as she easily (with shocking ease, really) slides into her new life left me in awe. I’m pretty sure I never would have recovered from her past to begin with, let alone be able to shed the baggage of that previous life like a snake skin on Eddie’s doorstep.
But just when you think you can see the predictable conclusion, Hawkins throws one more curveball. My jaw hit the floor and there I was…needing just one more chapter!
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You whet my appetite for this new read. Keep the suggestions coming.
I love a book I just can’t put down! I’ll have another one posted soon…I read it in one weekend at the beach! It was a page turner!