WIVES Paperback – 30 December 2019

I am going to keep it simple. THIS BOOK IS EXCEPTIONAL. THIS BOOK IS SPECIAL. THIS BOOK WILL MAKE YOU FEEL EVERYTHING SO VIVIDLY LIKE IT'S A PHYSICAL REACTION. You will love and hate and then love the characters. Innumerable facets weave in and out of the plot. The intriguing, fascinating and sickening aspects of human psyche. The games of Id. The secrets after secrets bombarding your mind.I am still reeling and I am still not sure what is true and what is false. This is the very definition of emotional twilight zone. This book must be in your 2019 list. Tarryn Fisher has created a masterpiece.This is categorically a psychological thriller but the range of emotions is ASTOUNDING ! The characters will do scandalous and unimaginable things. And those made the characters true , honest and relatable. There are only grey characters in the story. The husband and all three wives. I felt like I am going crazy half of the time. The illusions are deceiving. The truths are disbelieving. The emotions will scrape your heart raw. My jaw is hurting from dropping to the floor way too many times. My heart is all over the places and buzzing with crooked feelings.The Wives by Tarryn Fisher is definitely one of the best thrillers I have read. The words are pure gems dripping in dark suspense and mysterious sensations.Received ARC through Netgalley and Wildfire Marketing Solutions for honest review

The twists and turns the book offers are so good that you want to keep reading chapter after chapter. Must read!

Okay, let me catch my breath! I finished reading the book today, and my head is still spinning! So convoluted is the story, with such twists and turns that it leaves you wondering what exactly happened. But that exactly, is also the downside of the book. Let me explain.The story is from the point of view of Thursday, a woman, whose husband is a polygamist. A polygamist is a person who has more than one wife or husband at the same time. So Seth, her husband is a polygamist with three wives, Monday, Tuesday and Thursday. This is Thursday’s story.Seth keeps his three relationships completely separate, and parallel. None of the wives know the other wives’ names, and they have never met. Thursday is okay with this arrangement, and every Thursday, the day of the week that her husband visits her, she goes into the role of the perfect wife, constantly wondering whether or not she has beaten the other two to it.But one fine day, Thursday finds a doctor’s receipt with a woman’s name in the pocket of Seth’s laundered clothes. Her curiosity piques, and she wants to find out who this woman is. Whether she is Monday, or Tuesday. So behind Seth’s back, she goes to see this woman, her husband’s third wife. As she gets to know her, she realizes that her body bears bruises, marks suggestive of abuse. Does her – their – husband, the loving caring Seth, hit her? And from there begins a twisted and convoluted tale that gets murkier by the minute.After a while, we are confused. Is Seth a psychopath? Is Thursday insane? Or are the other two wives up to something?The premise is good and the narration is gripping. The flow of the story is fluid and I was literally clenching my fists in anticipation.But as we cross the middle of the story, the sequence of events completely baffles us so much that we can’t tell what is true and what isn’t. The character of Thursday, which has been developed nicely from the beginning, suddenly loses its charm and everything that we have come to believe, is left dangling in a big question mark. The end brings another, last, revolting shock, but by then we are so used to getting shocked that it really doesn’t affect anymore.This is one of those stories where I feel that the third person POV would have been better rather than first person. And probably that is why it has become so confusing.There are unnecessary parts which could have been easily skipped, and some parts could have been written in more details.There are many characters but the story focuses so much on Thursday that the other characters are very ill-defined. I would have loved if the POV had shifted to Seth, or Monday, or Tuesday, or even Lauren, her colleague, once in a while. That would probably have clarified the plot a bit more.Overall, this is a good psychological thriller to begin with, but loses its charm somewhere down the line. I read it because of the hype it has created amongst readers of this genre. It is a good read, but definitely not matching the said hype. I rate it 3 stars.

My Rating: ⭐⭐⭐1/4Type: StandaloneGenre: Psychological ThrillerNarration: single POVI had heard some wonderful reviews about this book. I wanted to pick this for a long time and finally picked it up. Somehow, this book was disappointing to me. It didn’t live up to my expectations.Story is told by heroine Thursday’s point of view. As blurb says, Thursday has entered a unique arrangement with her husband. Her husband has other two wives. She lives in Seattle working as a nurse. Her husband Seth only sees her on Thursdays. All wives are aware of this arrangement but have never met each other or know about the other. His time with other wives is divided equally or so he says. When Thursday stumbles upon an information, she gets curious and starts digging more about his other wives.Slowly plot takes a different turn when the truth behind this arrangement is reveled. The plot looks simple on surface, but as the chapters are unfolded it bides you with the suspense. The polygamist concepts didn’t bide well with me. Yet, I was curious to see how this would turn out. This book doesn’t focus anything on the polygamist concept as well. It started being crazy, with so many convoluted twists, all of which are ridiculous and cannot possibly happen.The reason I rated this low is for two reasons. One – it felt like story dragged in the middle a bit and characters became different people than what it started. Secondly, I felt like the twist could have been executed and developed better as it has been written by a very seasoned author. I was also detached from heroine, Thursday as it felt like she didn’t have a personality of her own.Writing style was good. Plot moved well initially and dragged a bit in middle and picked up in fast pace in the ending. Some questions still remain unanswered.Overall, I would recommend this to psychological thriller lovers. If you enjoy some craziness factor, this one might be for you!