Disappointing.

What I wanted:

Strangers, each with their own sinister intentions, playing a deadly game of cat and mouse in a remote mansion, cut off from society by the harsh Wisconsin winter. Jane Eyre meets Killing Eve meets And Then There Were None.

What I got:

A  "love story" between a middle-aged incel (Ralph) and a troubled beauty (Catherine).

A Reliable Wife had so much promise, but it somehow let me down every step of the way.

I’m hardly an expert on 1909 Wisconsin, so I was interested to learn about the history of this location and how it would play into the plot. The one thing I could imagine about the Wisconsin winter during this time period is how barren and isolating it must have been. Unreliable, potentially dangerous, characters trapped together in a mansion amidst a blizzard, plotting against each other, and becoming increasingly paranoid and unstable throughout the winter- I was hooked.

Alas, this was not the atmospheric thriller I was hoping for. Rather, this book is a character study of lonely people; people who are so desperate to be loved that they are willing to commit (or forgive) any crime. Once you understand this fact about the main characters, all of their actions become easily explained. I was anticipating something more mysterious, more haunting, more disturbing (and disturbing as in emotionally interesting, not just weird sex stuff… but I’ll get to that later).

Here’s a quick summary (complete with spoilers).

Ralph’s mom was very religious and cruel to him, so he grew up to have a really messed-up relationship with his sexual feelings and impulses. This leads to him becoming a sex-obsessed adult. He over-analyzes purity and is unable to detangle his loneliness from his lust and the associated guilt he has been conditioned to feel. He ends up getting married, but then his wife cheats on him- so now he also has trust issues. Ralph copes with his resentment for his wife by beating the son that resulted from her affair, Antonio. Naturally, Antonio grows to hate Ralph and runs away as soon as he is able. Antonio basically becomes a sociopath as a result of the abuse he endured as a child. As an adult, he is obsessed with getting revenge against his father.

Catherine is an unlucky but beautiful woman forced to turn to prostitution to support herself and her younger sister following the deaths of their parents. Catherine meets Antonio and falls in love with him because he’s hot and gives her a crumb of positive attention. Antonio convinces Catherine to marry Ralph, then poison him with arsenic (because… revenge). Catherine ends up warming to Ralph and becomes convinced that he is a good man because he feels remorse for abusing Antonio and wants to make amends. Ultimately, she chooses not to follow through with the murder and wants to live happily ever after with Ralph. This makes Antonio mad, so he shows up to cause trouble. He ends up attacking Catherine, so Ralph murders him. It also turns out that Ralph knew about Catherine and Antonio’s evil plot all along, but he doesn’t care. Ralph’s ambivalence to the attempt on his life seems to be a product of the guilt he feels over how he treated Antonio and the love he feels for Catherine for ending his loneliness.

So, there is a murderous plot but it takes a backseat to the characters’ personal issues. Twists are revealed suddenly and with minimal foreshadowing, so even major plot points feel like mere blips on the radar of this monotonous and gloomy study of loneliness.

I was misled by the book jacket, that happens. This was not the story I was hoping for. Unfortunately, that was the least of this book's crimes.

Let's get into my least favorite elements of this book.

The Writing

While I’m sure that some enjoy it, Goolrick’s writing style is just not to my taste. He makes heavy use of repetition, which is one of my least favorite rhetorical devices. Instead of challenging the reader to pick up on context clues or convey his points through symbolism, Goolrick directly tells the reader his point. And then goes on to tell us a few more times after that.

Goolrick also chooses to use an omniscient style of narration- revealing the inner thoughts of every character. While most chapters seem to focus on the point of view of a single character at a time, there are some scenes where we are privy to the thoughts of everyone involved. I found this to be a strange choice for a story with so many mysterious elements. I think that the book may have benefited from leaving some of the character’s intentions unknown in order to maintain that sense of mystery and build suspense.

The Themes

I came away from this reading experience feeling like I'd been hit over the head with a repetitive and unoriginal thesis statement. People are driven by their past traumas, pain, and insecurities. People can be selfish, people can be cruel, people can be irrational. Sometimes people can move past their issues by accepting the sins of their past and focusing on the future, but usually, they can't. Bummer.

The description of this book draws a comparison to Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. If this was indeed Goolrick's inspiration for this book, it would appear that he managed to extract some elements of Bronte's story while failing to replicate anything that actually makes Wuthering Heights a classic. Revenge plays a major role in both stories, and the authors both make statements on human nature that aren’t very positive. That said, Wuthering Heights is so well regarded because Emily Bronte’s poetic prose elevates the story, not to mention the added intrigue of the historical context and implications of the book. As I read A Reliable Wife and reflected on this comparison, I found myself wishing I was just reading Wuthering Heights instead.

The Twists

The "big twists'' in this story don’t pack much of a punch. Instead, these reveals actually alleviate tension rather than building it, lowering stakes and making the story less exciting.

Twist 1: The reveal of Antonio as our criminal mastermind
Antonio is completely defined and driven by his daddy issues, so he makes a completely uninteresting antagonist. There is never a glimmer of hope that he will be redeemed or any encouragement for the reader to sympathize with him. Imagine writing the victim of child abuse to somehow still be a completely unsympathetic villain… why can’t we have complex characters in this book? This reveal also takes away Catherine’s agency as a character and reduces her to a puppet. Catherine isn’t fighting a growing affection for a man that she wants to kill, she is simply trapped in a love triangle.

Twist 2: Ralph’s awareness of Catherine poisoning him… and he doesn’t care
A murder plot that relies on a slow death by poisoning is risky because the murderer could get caught before the job is done. If the reader were allowed to speculate about what might happen if Catherine did get caught, or watch Ralph struggle to understand what is happening to him, the story would have been so much more exciting. We might be afraid of what Ralph might do to Catherine if he found out- would he murder her? We might actually root for Ralph to figure out what is happening to him before it’s too late, or at least pity him for being unable to save himself. But Ralph is able to save himself, he just decides not to.

Twist 3: Ralph having known of Catherine and Antonio’s relationship from the start
Already knowing that Ralph was content to allow Catherine to murder him, this is hardly a surprise. The only impact of this reveal is to further convince me that Ralph has zero critical thinking skills since he could have saved himself and Catherine a lot of suffering by simply having a conversation with her about this midway through the book.

The Characters

I didn’t find either of our protagonists to be particularly compelling. Catherine felt flat and uninteresting, while Ralph was just plain unlikeable.

Catherine is a pretty basic archetype; the unlucky girl with a heart of gold. She's beautiful yet unloved, life has been unkind to her. Initially, Catherine is portrayed as some kind of femme fatale, complete with cheesy lines like, “she enjoyed her body, the way women sometimes do”. This aspect of her character fades fairly quickly, as it becomes clear that her character is indecisive and nervous rather than dangerous and capable. For all the talk about her good looks, they ultimately play no role in the story. So why did her great beauty feature so heavily in her characterization? Probably because there isn’t much else to her.

Catherine has been manipulated into plotting Ralph’s murder because she has never known any kind of ~real love~. I found the revelation that Antonio was behind the whole thing to be incredibly disappointing. Catherine’s most interesting quality was the mystery surrounding her motivation. Was she some kind of black widow serial murderess, had she done this before? What in her past drove her to the point where she was willing to take a life for money? But no, the motivation is not Catherine’s at all. She is simply a pawn in Antonio’s grand plan. Catherine also likes to read. This never really ends up being important, but I guess it's an effort to humanize her. This is her only other notable trait.

I found Ralph’s pov’s really tough to get through. His inner monologue consists of two things: self-pity and sexual desire. A character doesn’t need to think about sex every other line to convey loneliness or even perversion… sometimes less is more. A few impactful lines would have gotten this point across. Better still, let the reader learn about Ralph’s character through his behavior instead of his thoughts.

Ralph’s thoughts show that he is unable to separate the personality and being of a woman from her sexuality.

He admires his first wife for her “purity”, then grows to despise her for her infidelity. He spares no critical thought to why their relationship failed. Ralph knows Catherine is killing him, but he becomes obsessed with her because he wants to have sex with her. His relationships with these women are defined by sex, their personalities and thoughts irrelevant

. While Ralph’s misogyny was likely a norm of the time period, it certainly won him no favor in my mind.

It appears that Ralph’s redeeming quality is meant to be that he regrets abusing his wife’s son, Antonio. Forgive me if I’m running low on sympathy for a man who would beat a child, but I really don’t find his guilt to make up for any of his actions.

Finally, Ralph and Catherine don’t have chemistry. There wasn’t a single moment in the entire book where I found myself rooting for their romance. With their romance being so centered in the plot, I would have really liked to see at least a bit of rapport building between them. Instead, it feels like these characters simply settled for each other to alleviate their loneliness.

The Ick

I complained a bit about the emphasis on Ralph’s sexual thoughts, but I feel the need to create a separate section to really explain it. These long, repetitive sections about Ralph’s “desires” are just plain gross. I’m not mad about the sexual themes, I’m mad about how poorly they are written. So many lines made me cringe.

For example, this phrase:

“her nipples rose up and radiated heat”

Or when a penis is described as:

“pliant as a fish”

Once again, it’s not the subject matter that bothers me- religious guilt, especially around sex, is an interesting topic and can be an interesting element in a story. Ralph’s intrusive thoughts and inner conflict could’ve been an engaging element of his character, but this is just poorly delivered.

Many of these graphic and uncomfortable descriptions,

including the sexual assault at the end of the book

, felt so unnecessary- played for shock value more than anything else. A good author can write these terrible moments like an accident you can’t look away from. You are passionate about the actions of the characters because you’re invested in their story. That’s not what this felt like. Rather than engrossing me in the story and making me feel horror on behalf of the characters, moments like this pulled me away from the world of the book. I found myself wondering why the author would write these scenes in this way, and wishing I didn’t have to be reading them.

Redeeming Qualities

I imagine that this book would have been easier to enjoy if I had known what I was in for. My expectations and hopes for this book played a large role in why it disappointed me so much, and it would be unfair to pin that all on the book itself.

My reading experience did improve noticeably around the middle of the book, with insufferable Ralph out of the center of the narrative. The second half of the book is much easier to read - the pacing is better, and the scope of the story is a bit wider with Antonio as another main character.

There were a lot of interesting concepts in this book (which is why my expectations were so high), and while I wasn’t happy with how they were ultimately handled, I still have to give Goolrick credit for sewing those seeds.

But would I recommend this book? Nope.