The Husbands: A GMA Book Club Pick

So far so good!

Good book ! It shipped fast

But I absolutely loved this one. As mothers, we’ve ALL felt this way. From the imbalance of responsibility to the hope that we may, finally, find our “village”. This was so well written, and without any spoilers…I really thought I had the ending figured out. I was so wrong in THE BEST way possible!! Looking forward to reading more from this author!

They say payback’s a bitch, and male readers like myself feel the sting in Chandler Baker’s wonderful horror mystery and biting social commentary, “The Husbands.” This novel turns on its head the seminal satirical horror story “The Stepford Wives,” published a half century earlier. In “The Husbands” it is the men in an upscale suburban neighborhood who are reengineered.How the highly accomplished career women of Dynasty Ranch pull this off I’ll leave to the reader’s discovery. And anyway, it’s rather secondary.Primary is the modern woman’s lament. While it’s expressed with no holds barred throughout the story, nowhere is it stated more clearly than in the author’s note at the conclusion of the novel.“Nobody taught us to pack diaper bags. Do our husbands not see the clothes piled at the bottom of the stairs that need to be brought up? Why, when our husbands are in charge of making plans, are there so many missing details? Sure, they’re happy to help when asked, but why do we have to be the ones asking? Especially when the very act of asking is so loaded that it tends to go by another name entirely – nagging.“Women spend almost twice as much time on unpaid work as their male counterparts,” adds Baker, citing a 2020 New York Times news story.The plot progresses nicely, with Baker deftly teasing the details of three plot points: the retraining of men, an accident that haunts our female protagonist and the unsolved murder of a Dynasty Ranch resident. Baker has a good feel for dialogue too. A neighborhood dinner conversation involving several couples had me smiling, and a career chat at a law firm about stepping up and putting in long hours felt very real. The latter is familiar ground for Baker, herself an attorney. It’s no mystery that the partner track proves particularly challenging for women starting families.“The Husbands” is creepy at its core. But the novel’s ending left me laughing. Although Baker’s protagonist rejects the invasive, unethical reengineering of her husband for equality in the home, she embraces his retraining for equality between the sheets. Can we blame her?

I'm enjoying the read. Finding it much like Stepford Wives. BUT, and it's a big problem, none of the text messages are readable on a paperwhite! You can't enlarge the picture enough. The ebook needs to be reformatted so that the messages are text not images. Publishers need to pay attention to this kind of thing.