Book Review: GOOD HUSBANDS

Title: Good Husbands
Author: Cate Ray
Publisher: Park Row
Pages: 386
My GoodReads Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Three women, Jessica Jackson, Stephanie Brooke and Priyanka Lawley, strangers to each other, get an identical letter from a woman called Holly Waite, who tells them that her mother, Nicola Waite, was raped 30 years ago in 1990 by their husbands, Maximilian Jackson, Daniel Brooke and Andrew Lawley. For all of them, in marriages of love and trust, the allegation in the letter is deeply disturbing.

The letter evokes different reactions. Jess wants the truth. Priyanka is at first determined to protect Andrew, then loses confidence in him and is undecided about what to do. Stephanie wants to protect her husband and save her family, no matter what. While the other two would prefer to hide from the truth, Jess eggs them on, seeking to band together as a team.

Jess makes it her goal to get justice for Nicole, and Holly too, knowing that the truth could upset their lives and break up their marriages and families.

But will they ever get at the truth, and will justice be served?
 

The novel is written in the first person present tense PoV of Jess, Priyanka and Stephanie. The book is written in three parts, The Letter, The Diary and The Key, each of which drive the action onward.

The premise is a weighty one. A strong woman in a committed marriage learns that her husband has raped somebody in the past. How would she react?

I liked the writing. Here’s a sample:

It’s so temperamental, sexual interplay. One word, one look can alter things dramatically… Attraction is just smoke and mirrors. So fragile, desire can vanish at any moment.

Bitter looks ugly when unwrapped.

At 400 pages, the book is long, with not much action filling up those pages, but although I found myself impatient, I wasn’t bored. The author raises the point about the steady breakdown of democracy in many countries, including India.

The novel meanders a lot, going into questions of male privilege, testosterone, even marital sex, whether a wife can say No, and the age-old assumption that when a woman is raped or sexually assaulted, she was ‘asking’ for it. How the blame is shifted on to the girl, while the perpetrator is condoned.

There is an extensive section about the gaslighting that women are subjected to. And above all, the institution where the heinous act was committed, Montague Club, where women weren’t even allowed in until the 80s.

I found Priyanka’s job very interesting. Although ungraded, we need more discussions on such subjects for young people and teenagers.

I was happy to see an Indian character, ticking off the diversity quotient. I was happier still to know she wasn’t a stereotype. The only mistake was the author’s acknowledgement of her Punjabi Indian heritage. Bandyopadhyay, Priyanka’s surname, is Bengali, not Punjabi.

Stephanie was the character I warmed the least to. She was the most unwilling to believe in the veracity of Nicole’s story, believing the lies about the woman’s promiscuity and how she asked for it. But I also felt sorry for her once she revealed that she learned to keep my sentences short because he often interrupts me when I’m speaking, doesn’t ask what it was that I was going to say.

Priyanka changes her stance when she is confronted by all the lessons around consent that she teaches her students.

Jess is the driving force, for the greater part of the book, the only one to believe Nicole. Of the three women, she has the most powerful and unwavering moral compass. Between them, the three women spanned the gamut of reactions to rape.

Even the men are each representative of a type. There is the ‘weak’ Mr Nice Guy, the brash, militant type and the one who gets by on his looks.

Each of the characters went through turmoil in their respective lives, and they all underwent change.

This was a book about strong women, every single one of them, major and minor characters alike. I also liked how every single thread was resolved, and every character given closure, down to Shelley Fricker. In the end, this band of women stood up for their own against the power imbalance.

(I read this book on NetGalley. Thank you to the author, the publisher and NetGalley.)