Other People's Housesby Abbi Waxman
Rating: ★★★★
isbn: 9780399587924
Publication Date: April 3, 2018
Pages: 330
Genre: Fiction
Publisher: Berkley
At any given moment in other people’s houses, you can find…repressed hopes and dreams…moments of unexpected joy…someone making love on the floor to a man who is most definitely not her husband…
*record scratch*
As the longtime local carpool mom, Frances Bloom is sometimes an unwilling witness to her neighbors’ private lives. She knows her cousin is hiding her desire for another baby from her spouse, Bill Horton’s wife is mysteriously missing, and now this…
After the shock of seeing Anne Porter in all her extramarital glory, Frances vows to stay in her own lane. But that’s a notion easier said than done when Anne’s husband throws her out a couple of days later. The repercussions of the affair reverberate through the four carpool families–and Frances finds herself navigating a moral minefield that could make or break a marriage.
Well, this is not the Abbi Waxman I was looking for. This was a much more intense, painful story than the other 3 I’ve read so far, and while the humor is still there, it’s not at all light-hearted. This is a story that reads like a fictionalised version of the author’s experience (there is no evidence at all that this is the case). The language is cruder, the emotions are rawer; there’s a lot of anger. There’s also a lot of navel gazing about parenthood, which, you know, not really my jam. But the writing is excellent and I got sucked into the lives of all these people, whether I wanted to be there or not. A very compelling read.