Witty and dark, Maud Ventura's My Husband tells the story of a wife who is completely, utterly, hopelessly obsessed with her husband. We get an in-depth look into the inner workings of her mind, watching the gears turn as she sets a million little traps for her husband to fall into. She is exacting, punishing, and a mess. She is the adult version of the young women we've all known who perfectly followed the relationship advice from teen magazines. She is self-aware to the point of being totally oblivious to what's actually going on and who is really in control. The book makes you the reader unsure of what's happening as well, sucking you so deeply into the protagonist's world that even we fail to see beyond the confines of her imagination. Overall, short, funny, twisty read that I really enjoyed!

I loved this book—I was thinking about it when I wasn’t reading it. I loved the complexity of the narrator she would make me angry, but I was always entertained. —she is entirely neurotically obsessed with her husband. However, I didn’t think she was this boring woman. I was fascinated by how she went about her day—how she would describe the days of the week and how they correlated to her interactions with her husband, she was so unhinged that her love caused her to do things against him. I found that her depiction of love is actually kind of relatable and I have never read a book that explores marriage in this way.

I loved the premise of this story: a woman so obsessed with her husband that she keeps a notebook tracking his transgressions and also those actions that prove his love for her. I love a good obsession story and this did not disappoint! This would be perfect for fans of Mrs. March or Gone Girl (with a touch of madness).

ARC from NetGalley; translated from French.

Following a French woman who is unnaturally obsessed with her husband. That’s it. That’s the plot. I don’t know how it worked, but it totally did. The entire thing was unhinged perfection. I had no clue how this book could possibly wrap up, then BAM… incredible ending.

Run, don't walk, to read this book. This tale of obsessive marital love is absolutely phenomenal. It's extremely novel, I couldn't put it down!!

Oh wow! This book was amazing!
It is definitely a mood read. This isn’t a quick read for just any mood. You have to follow the narrators state of mind and pay attention. That’s probably why I couldn’t finish it in one session.

But it was quite a fascinating and disturbing read! I love that we never even learn the name of “The Husband”. He is just “my husband”.

The story takes place over a week. Each day we learn a little bit more about the narrators nuances. Her coding of the days by colors was fascinating!

This book was awesome!

On a whin one day, I read Gone, Girl by Gillian Flynn. It was a kindle challenge and I needed a book I hadn't read before. I'd heard of it but somehow never read it. I blew through it in a night.

This was no different. On the recommendation of a friend wanting to read this book, I requested it. Waiting until July was tormenting me but after a few weeks I got the approved email and had the book sent to my kindle. Now, it's the last week of school, we've got trainings, room cleaning, and baseball season, so I couldn't properly sit down and read, but let me tell you - every spare moment was taken up with my nose in this book. I couldn't put it down. I fell asleep reading it, woke up in the middle of the night to use the restroom and found my kindle open and read more, read at the baseball games, I couldn't get enough.

I used to think that I'd have a hard time reading books that had a narrator I didn't like - this proved me wrong. While reading I kept thinking I'd gotten to the best part, and I'd give it a solid 4 star rating - then I finished the book and discovered I was wrong again. GREAT BOOK.

A tightly written psychological study and thriller, My Husband by Maud Ventura is look into the chaotic mind of a woman obsessed with her husband and her marriage. Through the course of one week, the main charater evaluates every minute detail of her interactions with her spouse, from how long he holds her had to his every interactin with others in her presence. With a surprise ending, the reader is left with an in depth look at obsession, paranoia, and the protaganist's definition of love.

A truly amazing and painful and deliciously mean-spirited interior journey. I loved every word of it, and only wanted more!

4.5

Deliciously unhinged!
Dark and funny character study that looks at emotional dependence, power relations, societal expectations/constraints, and paranoia. A feminist romp.
That ending!! So savage.

So so fun! I don’t know if calling it a thriller is accurate, it’s definitely a lot more interior than a typical thriller. The last chapter really cinched it for me, this is obviously not a healthy couple which others might not want to read about but I found it incredibly engaging.

I forced myself to finish reading this one in hopes that the ending would be satisfying... and it was not. Billed as a suspenseful and darkly funny thriller, I found this book to be overwhelmingly tedious and lacking any thrill whatsoever. It's the story of two deeply damaged people secretly inflicting psychological torture on each other. Read it if you have some weird beef with French people and are looking for ammunition to fuel your hatred, otherwise steer well clear.

“My husband has no name; he is my husband, he belongs to me.”
This book tracks a woman’s quiet, all-encompassing obsession with her husband over the course of a week. The protagonist isn’t a helpless housewife- she’s got plenty of agency. She constructed this world for herself, a cage of her own creation, and she doles out secret punishments when her husband doesn’t fit into his role. I keep thinking about @aubs.kamilah ‘s description of this as a psychological thriller without a plot- exactly.
Also, with the protagonist being a translator herself, I shouldn’t be surprised by the impressive translation, but I am. It holds up.

This book was listed as a darkly comedic thriller - right up my alley! Unfortunately, there was no thrill in this at all. Nobody was ever in danger. There was no crime, no “secrets from the past”. There was no mystery, except for why our first-person protagonist is so strange, and the suspense is mostly what her psychiatric condition may be.

This is told by a married woman (names don’t seem to be important in this book) with two kids. She’s a French-English teacher and translator. She is obsessed with her husband. She’s the type who puts on fresh lipstick when he’s coming home from work, whose heart still flutters she sees him. She doesn’t like her kids because they distract him. She’s also the type to keep note of his transgressions, and punish him for them.

“There’s the thrill,” you would think. “She’s going to punish him with physical and psychological torture!”

No, it’s more mildly amusing than anything, and the ending makes it even more of a joke. This was a fast-paced book that I didn’t hate reading, but I’m still not sure what the point was. I think if the ending was revealed sooner, maybe interwoven somehow, it might have been a much better book. This would also have made a great short story. The ending punchline was good, but did we need an entire novel to get there?

This is also listed as a romance book, which I didn’t notice at first, but thankfully, I wouldn’t call it that either. This is just a general fiction book about a woman who probably has something going on that I’m not qualified to diagnose. I may be an outlier, but I’m giving this 2.5 stars, rounded up for the epilogue and to account for the translation.

(Thank you to HarperVia, Maud Ventura and NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for my review. This book is slated to be released in English on July 10, 2023.)

Prologue
“My husband turns on Brazilian music that pairs perfectly with the smell of toasted bread and a peaceful Sunday morning atmosphere”.
“While I am finishing my coffee, my husband leans toward me and whispers into my ear, ‘We need to find a moment to talk’. Then, after a short pause, he adds, ‘It’s important’.”
“I’m frozen, unable to say a word”.
“It’s over”.

One week earlier . . .

“I love my husband as much as the day I met him.
I wish I could text him all day. I imagine telling him. I love him every morning, and I dream of making love to him every night. But I restrain myself, because I also need to be a wife and mother. I’m too old to at love lovesick”.
“For fifteen years, I’ve lived with the permanent and paradoxical affection of being loved back—of passion with no apparent obstacle. I can’t hope for anything more, I can’t hope for anything better, and yet the void that I feel is immense, and I am always waiting for him to fill it. But what could possibly fill what is already full?”

*She* (our unnamed protagonist) has been an English teacher for fifteen years.
‘She’ is also a French English translator for a Publishing House.

‘She’ trembles with pride when she says ‘my husband’ works in finance.
She met her husband at a rock concert. Her husband has no name; he is simply ‘my husband’ as he belongs to her.

‘She’ loves Mondays. People have told her that loving Mondays is a brainiac thing— that only nerds are happy when the weekend is over.
“That might be true. But it comes back to my love of beginnings. I’ve always preferred the first chapters of a book, the first fifteen minutes of a film, the first act of a play. I like starting points. When everyone is in their rightful place in a world
that makes sense”.

How could *She* explain why she has a solitaire diamond that’s practically identical to the one he gave her the day he proposed? She hides it in the false bottom of her jewelry box.

A few months after *She* met *Him* (The unnamed Husband), she ended things with him. A two week hiatus during which she ran back into the arms of a former lover, Adrien.
Then, one day, ‘,She’ left a note on the pillow and returned to the man who would become her husband.
“What happened during those two weeks of wavering is none of his business”.

“When my husband is at home, I lose all ability to concentrate. I jump at the slightest sound in the stairway”……
Get it?
*SHE* . . . is OBSESSED……with love for her husband….[yet is also obsessed with worry if her husband is in love with her]….


So……let the (revenge) games begin . . .

Several headings of each chapter is a day of the week… Beginning with Monday.
*She* has specific rules about what happens on each one of these days or what each day symbolizes. And they all have a ‘color’.
“My yellow Thursday start joyfully”.
Wednesday, for example, is an orange day, like a Clementine.
And, of course… Saturday is red—“for him”.
“It’s the day that has to be reinvented each week, without even the Sunday rituals to cling to”.
Saturday is the day that her husband likes most, but she likes least.

The protagonist is Queen of righteous indignation, and of observations….
“Couples who don’t love each other anymore don’t care about not catching everything. They think of their exchanges as a text with many holes, and are not unbothered by it; they say it’s no big deal, they’ll fill in the gaps later. I think the need to be exhaustive is proof of love: not wanting to lose a single word”.
OR….
“I’ve always found tranquil, partnerships uninteresting. Couples that don’t ever argue come off as inferior, and I’ve always suspected they love each other less. But I’ve also always refused to engage in ordinary squabbles. That my husband doesn’t do the dishes after dinner, or doesn’t know how to iron a shirt is annoying, but those are obstacles I can overcome; on the other hand, I don’t know that I would be able to bear such a banal argument for such trivial a reason”.

A very fast — one gulp read:
A little hilarity…..
A little creepy…
A little pathetic…
A little grating….
A little clever….
…..but with a surprise Epilogue - so good - it raised my rating!!!

4 stars.

For readers who enjoy getting into the minds of dysfunctional characters/relationships and keeping it all at arm's distance for our own amusement, this book is entertaining. For me, the characters and relationships were all a bit too cringey, and the toxicity of the marriage overwhelmed me. I was most interested in the class critique elements of the book--the main character's working class upbringing vs that into which she married, and the ways she makes sense of her new station and how things work amongst the wealthy. I would have loved more emphasis there and less on infidelity, mind games, and dishonesty. Though I suppose some of that is a class critique unto itself!

All in, it was compelling, fast-paced, and a worthy look at how class and wealth operate in France--at least in this main character's mind. The ending turned me off a bit--in some ways, it cheapened the rest of the book for me and undermined the strength of the class critique.

Not since I read MRS. MARCH, have I been so enthralled with the twisted, sinister mind of a fictional character. An unnamed French woman is deeply in love with her husband. To her detriment. Having what most would observe as an ideal life, a flourishing career as a translator and teacher, two well-adjusted young children who adore each other, a beautiful home, and, of course, the husband with whom she has built a life with. Over the course of a week, we watch her become unhinged over the slightest petty comments he makes from comparing her to the wrong kind of fruit, letting go of her hand, daring to look at another woman. Her obsessive plans to express her love and attend to his needs are something for the ages. Her parenting skills give new meaning to cold. One brief scene, one movement, one line, is positively chilling. The ending is gasp-worthy.

It’s rare to find a story that is so evenly balanced with dark humor and unsettling drama. Et voilà! A masterful accomplishment. What a privilege to read this book.

Huge congratulations to the author Maud Ventura and the translator Emma Ramadan.

Thank you to NetGalley and HarperVia for the ARC of this book in exchange for my honest review.

This is a book that I already KNOWWW is gonna get lots of mixed reviews, and I kind of love that. Spoiler though: I loved it.

My Husband is a French translation about a woman who is obsessed with her husband. He consumes literally her every thought.

The energy, tone, and narrative voice all felt like they had aspects of a psychological thriller - but with the plot kind of missing. This sounds like a critique (and is definitely personal preference) but I preferred this!! I thought it was a really unique and introspective look into a character that easily could have been the subject of a much louder story - but this felt softer and more intimate. Instead of feeling like the purpose of the story was to be entertained (like a plot heavy thriller) - I felt the purpose was to simply observe, and I vibe with that.

I think a lot of people (especially men) would be quick to call our main character crazy for the way she overanalyzes every single glance/conversation/moment in her husbands life but like … I get her!!! A lot of the things she thinks are too wild to actually say out loud but … she’s not wrong!! I felt a strong defensiveness towards her although I know she’s meant to feel unlikeable.

Plot-wise there’s not a lot going on, we are mostly reading about her daily married life over the course of a few months? weeks? I’m not sure on the timeline. Even though the actual content felt mundane - being inside her mind was gripping. I had a hard time putting this down.

I had suspected the ending a little bit but Oooo I LOVED the way it ended. It was brief but punchy and effective.

*Thank you to Harpervia and Netgalley for the free digital ARC in exchange for an honest review!*

3.5 stars rounded up.

Did you ever love someone so much it hurt? Cared about them so much that you overanalyzed every word they said or action they took? This book multiples that by 100.

It follows the story of what goes on in the mind of our unnamed MC (wife) and the obsession with her husband (unnamed as well). Our MC is constantly questioning whether her husband loves her. She makes up punishments for his supposedly wrong doings (in her eyes at least). It was captivating to watch her spiral into these scenarios in her head. I have anxiety so sometimes I even found myself, dare I say, relating to the MC. I do wish there were a little more of the funny moments like when she screamed to wake her husband up and pretended to have a nightmare. I was LOLing in real life at that part. The epilogue got me! That was my favorite part. 😉

<i><b>This book was quirky and different, definitely a nice change of pace for me! It is best to go into this book without expectations and enjoy the ride.</b></i>

Thank you to NetGalley, Maud Ventura, and HarperVia for the digital copy for review. 😊

I devoured this book on a recent weekend trip, I think if you like Gone Girl and other marital obsessive dark dramas you will love this. The twist at the end made me see the whole novel in a new way. The fact that the whole novel centers around her husband was a bit sickening at times because it’s kind of pathetic but also confusing. One of those books with an extremely unlikeable protagonist but at the same time relatable.