The Wife App is a modern revamp of the The First Wives Club. The original motive, unlike the First Wives Club isn't revenge (though revenge enters the picture). Rather, the 3 main characters, 2 of whom are newly divorced decide to create an App to relive wives of their "Mental Load". Users of the app can hire a "wife" who will do such tasks as shop for presents, write and mail cards, fill out and submit private school applications, grocery shop etc. - an app somewhat similar to TaskRabbit.
Of course, along the way they find new loves (one is rather unexpected) and new lives - after all it's "chick lit".

This was a fun read that touches on both age old subjects such as the "second shift" and the unpaid labor of wives as well as modern ones such as the power of influencers. Almost all the characters come equipped with a large helping of "white privilege". Almost all the worker bees are stuck on the treadmill of the gig economy and the App users are high powered people with more money than time.
Some of the tasks undertaken by the "wives", such as escorting children to hundreds of special classes or helping navigate the private school labyrinth are quintessentially NYC but others are tasks just about every women has undertaken at one time or another.

While it's not set on the beach, The Wife App is perfect to tuck into your beach bag. I'd also suggest it for a Book Clubs that enjoy reading fiction that's not overly serious or literary.

A thank you to NetGalley for this E-Reader ARC.

I loved the premise of 3 divorced women working out a way to get paid for the Mental Load that is typically borne by the wife in heterosexual marriages by creating a "Wife App" to monetize and assist with those jobs. It's a brilliant concept and I liked the challenges and characters.

Great read about wives who work together and create an app that helps themselves and others to try and do it all and to have it all. Juggling soo many things all the time with kids, errands, trips, and everyday tasks who wouldn't want to have someone to help. Would highly recommend reading

In 1971, I purchased the first copy of Ms Magazine and read Judy Brady’s essay, “I Want a Wife.” It certainly resonated with me as I saw my mother and friends’ mothers juggling numerous tasks and never having a moment to themselves. Who wouldn’t want someone else to handle all the tedium of daily living? Surely, I thought, with the Women’s Movement, that will not be my lot in life when I am of age to marry.

Fast forward 50 some years, and things have not changed very much. Carolyn Mackler’s first adult novel, The Wife App, addresses this in a very entertaining and satisfying way. The book will remind you a bit of First Wives Club and Sex and the City because of the Manhattan upscale settings and the three women friends who meet for drinks and lunches. In fact, it is at one of their get togethers that the wife app idea is born. Why not get paid for all the du.ties (but not sex) that wives handle on a daily basis. I like that the characters chose to constructively be the saviors of their own lives and did not just get together to complain about the men who did them wrong. The app proved there is a market for women wanting to relieve their mental load.

The reader becomes invested in each of the women’s stories. They are all different, and they all grow as individuals. Interactions with children, ex-husbands, and friends are all realistic. I was engaged throughout the novel. It was also great fun to see what the various consumers of the wife app demanded.
Thank you to NetGalley and Simon and Schuyler for the ARC. Such a fun read!

This story is told recognizing the often times imbalanced responsibilities of couples in a relationship that mainly falls to the wife.
Keeping the home and family running smoothly is most often a thankless, but necessary job.
Every working woman and man needs The Wife App to keep their home life running smoothly, so they can keep their sanity!
This book is humorous and brilliantly written!
#TheWifeApp
#CarolynMackler

I liked this a lot. The mental load (or "Mental Load", haha) is real! I related to all of the characters and their different versions of modern wife-/mother-/parenthood, and it was interesting to think about what might make these gender inequities more balanced. I did think it went on too long, and the last hour of the book could have been seriously edited down. It felt like it was wrapping up when all of the characters were getting their resolution, but there was still so much more to go! And while I loved Sophie's story, hers also felt particularly saccharine at the end.

As a huge fan of The First Wives Club, I couldn't wait to read this one. Delightful, funny, and relatable! This one will be a great book club pick.

In The Wife App, three divorcees decide to start an app to make sure someone is paid for all the invisible work that mothers and wives do around the home. Lauren, Sophie, and Madeline are having drinks to celebrate Lauren’s divorce when the idea is born, and Lauren begins to develop the app, sharing the equity with her friends and hoping to change the world for women. After an influencer recommends the app to her followers, the app goes viral, and suddenly the women’s lives are all changed. Along the way they each handle issues with their exes and their children in this engrossing read.

I absolutely love the concept of this book. At the heart of the story is the fact that traditionally women are the ones carrying the mental load for the home- who needs new sizes in clothes, what groceries to purchase, making doctor’s appointments, buying the holiday gifts. The mental load is absolutely a real thing, and it only multiplies once children are involved. The idea of this app is fabulous- hire a Wife, and she will take in your Mental Load. The Wives pick up dry cleaning, research preschools, plan vacations, fill in forms…all the little things that take up so much time. I wish I was getting paid to do all of these things! The women comment that the app idea comes from the thought of all of the people who undervalue women’s labor, and this message resonated with me.

I liked all three of our main characters and found each to be admirable in her own way. They are all strong women who value their relationships and their children but also learn to value themselves during the journey of building the app. The men are almost a side note in this story, spoken of only when they are screwing something up or complicating the lives of the women. I loved seeing the women succeed and seeing Madeline throw herself into business mode, finding angel investors and teaching herself things she hadn’t done in years.

Thank you to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for the ARC in exchange for my honest opinion.

I loved this book not only because it was hilarious but it shed light on mental illness, gender identity, and coming out of the closet. All of these things would be great for a book group to discuss and need to be shared more in books. The author handled all of these with skill and sensitivity and easily wove them into the story.

Madeline, Lauren and Sophie are all divorced woman who come up with an app while out drinking one night. The wife app does things they have done for years with no compensation now people will pay them to do them. At first it starts out as a pipe dream but then it grows in popularity after being shared by an influencer.

I like how all the woman were vastly different yet they shared a beautiful friendship and supported each other in the good, bad and the ugly. Everyone needs these type of strong women in their lives. Although each woman has their own issues to deal with, children, and ex-husbands they manage to find their voices and be able to stand strong and prove they don't need a man to survive or to be happy.

I appreciated all the positive talk on dealing with CBT therapy and mental illness and showing that it is ok to get help and talk about these issues.

I thought of all the tasks I would let the wife app do for me which would be very freeing.

This was a very fun book! Three divorced friends set out to make an app to help deal with the "mental load" of being a wife. I just loved the concept of this book and wished this was a real app many times while reading it. Of course, the privacy and legal issues would probably make this impossible, I'm afraid but I still could vicariously enjoy it through the characters lives. The mental load of managing not only your life but everyone is the household typically falls on the woman and is rarely ever acknowledged, much less compensated for. I know lots of women will be able to relate to the ideas if not the characters directly. There are a lot of good points made about privilege as well. I was also surprised by several rather steamy scenes so one should know their audience before recommending this book. Overall, I really lighthearted, entertaining read that I have already recommended to several friends. Thanks for Netgalley and Simon & Schuster for an ARC of this book. All thoughts and opinions expressed are my own.

Lauren, Madeline, and Sophie are best friends who invent an app that monetizes the invisible drudgery of everyday life that is mostly taken care of by wives and mothers.

I read the synopsis of this and stabbed the read now button immediately because I LOVE the idea of monetizing the mental load. Unfortunately, the story fell apart for me fairly quickly, especially when it came to the characters. Since becoming a parent, I have worked outside of the home full time, then became a stay-at-home parent, and now I work part-time -- and none of these women or their situations felt particularly real or relatable to me. There were also some cringey sex scenes that I didn't love.

I will say, however, that Mackler made some really excellent points about invisible labor and did address the issue of privilege. This was a quick read that I think could be enjoyed by and relatable to many women, it just didn't quite work for me.

This was a light and fun read. Not my typical thriller but it was a nice break from such darkness. I love books that show women supporting women and this was a great example of that. That said, some of the characters were a bit too two dimensional for my liking.

I loved the concept of this book. I could totally relate to this book as a mom, wife and an ex-wife. The “mental load” is real. There were a couple moments in the book that felt a little disjointed but the story made up for that.

Really enjoyed this novel a fun read with a lot of truth about women and their realty.The woman’s friendships were really interesting.Will be recommending the author and the book.#netgalley #simon&schuster

On the evening of Lauren's divorce, she and best friends Madeline and Sophie drunkenly dream up the Wife App. The three women, resentful of having wife/mother duties taken for granted and bitter over poor treatment from their former spouses, realize that the duties of being a wife and mother constitute another full-time job usually given to women with little recognition or gratitude. The App, they dreamed, would allow wives and mothers to hire out their least favorite duties and it would allow others to get paid for doing those duties by proxy.

This book had a very unique premise, and what wife/mother would not love to farm out some of her dreaded tasks and make money off of ones they don't mind so much? It was a fun read from that perspective. In this book, all three women held a lot of anger, and while it was obvious two of the former husbands were jerks, Madeline's husband really wasn't; it seemed it was more Madeline who did not want to be married. There were times reading this book that it came across as a real "man-hater" type of book, not a social inequity message. This was a unique book, but not all men are like the one portrayed in this book.

|THE WIFE APP|
⭐️⭐️⭐️

You could say this book is inspiring! My husband is supportive and honestly does a lot of the house work, but man wouldn’t it be nice to hire someone to do it for us!
All in all, this book was a little slow and I didn’t feel like it had a lot of build up, but I really enjoyed it being told from multiple points of view, and that it was all about the women!

{READ THIS IF: you like powerhouse women, app developing/technology, multiple POVs}

Thank you to Netgalley and publisher for an arc in exchange for my honest opinion.

Publication: June 27, 2023

This book started out strong but the plot started to lose steam for me as a reader. I had a feeling this book would be close to a four star read because it had humor and seemed to fit in the same vein as "Finlay Donovan". The story started to feel a bit boring after the first quarter. I'm not sure if I was expecting more to the plot so ultimately, the book left me wanting more.
Overall, an easy beach read that will give you a couple of chuckles especially if you're a mom/divorced/early 40s.

The Wife App has a really interesting premise. Three friends and mothers- Madeline, Sophie, and Lauren- decide to make an app where men and women can hire people to do tasks that often fall on moms, like filling out forms for camp or school, hiring a tutor, planning a vacation, and much more. However, while the ending was happy, it felt rushed. The way the main characters resolved major problems or started new relationships felt too fast, and how their children reacted well to some of these changes seemed too simple. The premise was very interesting, and I liked the relationship amongst the three friends and the insight to creating and expanding the app. Overall, the premise of the app wasn't enough to carry the story for me, and the plot around the relationships was incomplete and rushed. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with a digital advanced copy!

This was okay. I read some of Carolyn Mackler's YA novels in middle school so it was funny to revisit her now as an adult. This was easy reading, and Mackler reinforces that working mothers in modern society are expected to do it all — work and run the household — and that mental load is exhausting. The titular Wife App tries to solve for the mental load of modern motherhood by allowing parents to offload household tasks to hired help. It's clever, but the story itself was predictable and tied up with a neat little bow. Mackler isn't trodding any new territory with the concept, characters, and plot lines.

Thanks to NetGalley for the advanced copy. I did not finish this book. The concept was interesting and some of the writing was good. However, there were too many very crude references that immediately turned me off of this book. I ultimately decided that those made this read a skip for me.